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@noob thanks awesom... also I meant to say midi in not movies in on previous post. Lol. Cheers.
Yes. The MIDI options in AUM are passed into SoundFontsAU. The MIDI IN works.
I drove it hard with a Mozaic script and needed to really scale back the piano to something
less CPU intensive. But with a flurry of notes you don't need so many layers for touch anyway. It's a good option for quality pianos in DAW's for $2.
Just picked up SoundFonts.. imported Nice-Keys-Ultimate V2.3 (which I had in Auria Pro).. hooked up Riffer + Nembrini’s Delay3000 in AUM.. chose a marimba patch..
Oh Yeah.. this will be much better as I pretty much live in AUM.. thanks everyone for the tips about SoundFonts.. it’s awesome! 👍
Yes can confirm, and yes it bothers me too. May be that the ‘resonance’ is sampled and not modelled due to limitations of sf2 format. Real pianos don’t sound like that.
Yes. That C6 sample has a nasty amount of noise in it. I hear it in the BS-16i version too.
Most sound fonts re-pitch a sample over a typically narrow range so one bad sample will
play as a range of bass samples.
With an app like Audio Layer you can toss out a bad sample and insert a better one in it's place or re-range the ones below and about to cover those notes.
The Salamander recordings were captured something like 10 years ago and spread widely as the best "free" sampleset.
For simplicity sake I'll see what other free SF2's exist and come close. It would be nice if someone fixed that sample with some effort to EQ out the extra noise but thousands of
Salamander sound fonts exist on the web and I'm not sure anyone ever called that out.
It comes pre-installed in Auria Pro so I should see if there version has the noisy C6.
Watch this video and compare several other free pianos.
Downloads from here for some:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13xC285QI7piXn9Zq4kGMI19UQa8gz89y
Free is fun but no support if there's a klinker... sometimes no support when there's a product with a bad sample either. Hundreds of recordings in these products.
I don't have Salamander Grand on my iPad right now. I have only the (I think) associated Upright Piano. But I remember the hiss on Salamander resonance being similar. I just checked it again. On the upright the hiss is on a lot more than just C6, it starts way further down and then it seems pretty bad on all the keys. I think you start to notice it only as notes get higher because lower notes have more body and hide the hiss.
On the upright soundfont I have you can load the 'Resonance' sample by itself as a separate "instrument"; I assume it's the same with the Salamander. I assume if you load a piano sample that has resonance, all it's doing is playing the 'Piano' sampled note and the 'Resonance' sampled note together at the same time.
The other thing that makes the hiss annoying is the resonance samples are only about 3 seconds long. After 3 seconds the hiss disappears (because the sample ended). So for those higher notes where the hiss is very noticeable you have the hiss for 3 seconds in a sustained note, then the hiss disappears entirely, which draws your attention to it even more.
I think the resonance is just poorly done and shouldn't be used. Still seems like a decent piano VST, at least for free.
FYI: Resonance samples can be mixed in with the dry sound too I think. Complex instruments even sample the pedal noises as an option. Ravenscroft goes to that level of detail. Colossus includes Hermiode tuning that identifies the 3rds in chords and shifts the pitch to make them sound more in tune.
But one of the best piano products models the instruments they sell and have very small RAM requirements: PIanoTeq. We want them on iPads very badly but they sell for a lot of money for each model.
Hopefully someone will also create a great modeled instrument.
Yes @McD the noise is particularly prevalent at C6 (and surrounding notes) but can be heard up to C7 and down to C4. Not sure how that got through QC but as @hes mentioned the ‘no res’ versions lack that layer and to my ears sound resonant enough. How does the lighter ‘Classic B Grand’ in Colossus compare in terms of responsiveness? Has me interested but pretty much never goes on sale.
I like the Classic B a lot. Very good samples and excellent playback sound engine for $15.
The Baby Grand at $26 and the Colossus Grand at $50 give you more layers so the softs
have the tone of a soft attack and the clouds have that energy. The few samples and the less RAM is consumed and in many ways the app becomes more stable with a lot of other AUv3's running on the same resources.
NOTE: You can hear the PianoTeq compared to several other real and sampled pianos here:
PianoTeq is at the 6:12 mark.
Here's a technical description of the Salamander recordings:
Yamaha C5, recorded with two AKG c414 disposed in an AB position ~12cm above the strings, 48kHz 24bit, 16 velocity layers. Sampled in minor thirds from the lowest A. Hammer noise releases chromatically sampled in one layer. String resonance releases in minor thirds in three layers.
So with only the resonance releases messed up Salamander is still considered to be
the premier Free Piano SoundFont.
There's one out there that has been captured by a vendor called "The Piano in 162".
It's really a close mic'ed and a far mic pair of recordings that it was intended you'd
mix like a dry/wet option. It's 6GB in size and comes in the SFZ format. But at this point
you have to pay for the file or use Bit Torrent to get it. Sounds pretty good and weighs in at 6GB. The Colossus $50 piano is 22GB by the way. It does run on my iPhone 5S as a portable sound module. It's so big I rarely have it on my iPad and when I do it takes 12 hours to download and if it hiccups... you start again. Crudebyte's file downloads are the worst on IOS for speed of access.
Ravencroft is the best. But beware for live exhibitions: sometimes is produces noises. It’s a pity otherwise it would be really great. iPad 2018 and Aum.
”tweaked” Salamander here; onle 30mb mite wanna chk this guys other stuff (all free)
https://sites.google.com/view/hed-sounds/salamander-c5-light
”
SalamanderC5-Lite, Grand Piano SoundFont (SF2 version)
24.5 MB (versus 1.12GB!sFz; or 650MB sf2)
Very close to the original sound quality.
New: 7 velocity layers!: 1."ppp", 2."pp", 3."p", 4."mp", 5."mf", 6."f", 7."ff-fff". (MuseScore compatible)
All samples are looped.
16 bit, 44.1kHz Sample Rate.
Free for personal use.””
I don't have Colossus Piano (I own iSymphonic from the same company). In terms of the sound, every instrument I've heard from Crudebyte has been better than anything I've compared it to.
In general, I've spent more time listening to acoustic instruments than digital recreations/samples, and only recently got into apps/plugins. To me, iSymphonic sounds more like the instruments they are intended to sound like than anything else I've heard, and when I watched this video, I thought Colossus Piano sounded more like a real acoustic piano in a room than any of the alternatives. Overall they are all pretty impressive and would all sound great in a mix, but there is something about the Crudebyte sound that is more real to me.
That’s not going to sound real playing sustained chords. You want long, high quality recordings
And it adds up.
Not worthy of the name Salamander after throwing away that much data.
Looping acoustic waveforms never sounds natural: it’s the uncanny valley experience like early digitized actors. Not buying the sound as quality.
But really short. Realistic attacks and the demo is all attacks until the slow section and then you can hear that the piano sounds like it’s underwater (subtle but soggy).
You only save disk space. CPU should be similar.
But it’s true. For most people the small sampled pianos are good enough and they cut.
Many old digital workstations had pianos in the 25MB size range and they do attacks convincingly
But real pianists can’t play them for too long without wanting to stop.
As the samples got longer the benefits of good recordings without looping started to allow more convincing experiences.
When we have free apps that sound like PianoTeq we’ll be there. No samples... just clever synthesis
of acoustic instruments. We will start to see that in the near future. Cheaper modeled instrument apps that are convincing.
meh.. just stapthe ranting mcD its just grumpy and un-sexy. trying to get piano sf2 out to ppl let em make their own choice
Fair enough. I hope some join the quest for excellent pianos and acoustic illusions.
agree on piano sounds tbh.. something must be missing when its reduced 80%.. its like Pizza, we know how it should taste.
side note;attack softener plus tiiiiny bit of crunk2 rly works wonders on the Yamaha grand sf2
That Salamander Lite is reduced more like 95% to 98%, from 600MB+ to 25MB. It's fine for what it is. But it's not anything that you'd want to use if you want the best sound. I play a lot of music from my digital piano; the Salamander Lite sounds like a toy compared to a quality VST like Pianoteq, Garritan CFX, or even my Roland's built-in pianos.
The full Salamander is not bad. I haven't done much testing with it and haven't tried it in a long time. I have to confess that, psychologically, even if the non-resonant samples are good, it bugs me that I'm working with a "broken" implementation in my VST that was intended to use the included crappy resonance samples. It would be better, I think, to package the full Salamander up in a soundfont without the resonance samples and avoid mentioning them.
@hes Not sure if you were around but we did have a “Battle of the Pianos” awhile back that @McD mentioned and the full Salamander won in a blind taste test. I’d be curious what everyone who’s joined the forum recently think of the results @tja
more Salamander to try out here https://sig-ex.com/2017/11/11/slender-salmander-grand-piano/
Features
Three phase aligned layers with velocity crossfading
Re-tuning using the Entropy Piano Tuner
Includes a lighter SFZ script using only two velocity layers
License* : Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Download
48kHz 24 bit (389 MB uncompressed wav
44.1kHz 16 bit (238 MB uncompressed wav
Have you gone through looking at all the different soundfonts here: https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/home
There are three separate Salamander soundfonts there: one at 157MB, one 237MB, and one 592MB. Plus a bunch of soundfonts with different pianos as well as other instruments.
Another vote for RC275. Much prefer the sound and function of it to Salamander (which is still v good but IMO needs a fair bit of EQing to sound natural) . Haven’t tried Colossus because once I got RC275 I was happy.
Yes, I agree it sounds good for some uses. For me, using it while playing my digital piano, I can clearly hear the resonance hissing on high notes, and clearly hear the hissing suddenly cut out entirely when I hold notes beyond 3 seconds. It might be perfectly fine for some music generation uses. And it does even sound pretty good when you're not using the resonance samples.
I’ll bet we can fix those Sustain Release samples around C6 but distribution will be limited.
It would also be a nice project to choose 3 layers and try a port to Nanostudio which can only process
3 layers in an instrument.
Your have to really love pianos to think this is useful but it’s also just a fun geek hobby and keeping geeks busy is important or they get up to mischief.
Just got me Soundfonts app. Never knew about this one glad you guys brought it up
How does Soundfonts compare to Bs-16i?
Or, to put it another way, if I already have Bs-16i, is there any point in me also having Soundfonts?
These modified Salamanders in SFZ format got me to try an AudioLayer import and it's not working. I deleted AudioLayer and set no iCloud option and moved the *sfz files (there are 4) and the samples folder to "on my iPad/audiolayer/import" and clicking on the sfz file. Doesn't load. Arg.
Sampling is a recipe for spending hours tinkering and not making music.
Thanks for exposing this new sf2 player. I'm enjoying find and testing sf2 files.
https://musical-artifacts.com is a fun site for downloading various sample package formats for specific app/hardware targets.
Is this the sort of app that would be used to fix and repackage the resonance samples? Or only repackage, fix them somewhere else? Or am I way off? What sort of process would you follow to fix them?
https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com/
Yes. That’s a Mac and Windows app right?
I suspect finding the right sample(s) and putting edited instances in their place/same name means it could be done using a wave editor in IOS.
Yeah, it's an open source soundfont editor that runs on Mac/Windows/Linux. I shudder to think of doing this kind of manipulation within an iOS app user interface.