Ableton Forum

Hey everybody -
I'm looking for some new piano samplers to incorporate into my live set. The ones provided by Ableton can do the trick, but I'm not the biggest fan of their overall sound. I'm looking into getting one or two of the piano samplers NI offers for their Kontakt player... BUT, they provide no demo version. I like the sound of what I'm hearing in their sample files, but I have no idea if my processor will be able to handle the instrument live. There are always a lot of things going on in my Live sets, and my CPU usage already hangs out at around 50-60%. I'm wondering if any of you have used these, or similar, NI instruments live and can attest to their stability in the live setting.

I'm working on a MacBook Pro, 2.2 GHz Processor Power, 2 GB Memory, Snow Leopard 10.6.4. Thanks!

For years Akoustik was my favorite piano plug in.

You should look into Pianoteq - it is physically modelled rather than sampled, 25MB install instead of 10GB, and runs with less load and at lower latencies. It also sounds good - but it is quite expensive. However, it has a demo.

http://www.pianoteq.com/

There's a really good one in the Reaktor user library, I forget what it's called.

The NI Piano's are pretty nice and really don't need much CPU at all. They need some RAM of course. If you've got RAM to spare but want to keep cpu down go with something like this. A modeled one will be heavier on cpu but light on ram. Truepianos is also worth looking at. It's sort of hybrid thing, uses a small amount of samples and modeling.

The EIC Grand Piano is lush, it's very plain but it's rich and chocolaty (to my untutored ears)

S