Pianoteq v9 released

Existing users can update from your user area.

There is some discussion in their forum. Various videos on YouTube already. Documentation in the Pianoteq 9 folder after installing.

I have not had time to evaluate it yet :slight_smile:

Have fun!

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I’ve always found the quality of pt piano sounds a bit lacking. No matter how you try to improve them, they just don’t quite sound natural. But, the Rhodes, Harp, and Guitar sounds are absolutely amazing!

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I’ve thought that many of the piano presets are quite realistic, but I agree about the classical guitars in particular. Those are really surprisingly good.

My GoTo Piano. For years I stuck with a modified version of the Steinway D Classical option but for the last 12 months I’ve switched to the Steinway Pop option as it is. I’m just coming to the end of a large collection of Folk Tunes arranged for Piano and I’ve used that setting throughout. Love it.

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I found Pianoteq 8 which I own clearly their best to date. But it still doesn’t rival a decent sampled piano (like my VSL ones) for beauty or naturalness of tone so I rarely use it these days. It may be that sampled instruments will be replaced by AI in the not too distant future but modelled ones still have quite a long way to go in my view.

I use Pianoteq for basic stuff and Keyscape for recordings. In my opinion it’s the absolute best.

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I played V8 and V9 side by side and really think V9 is MUCH better sounding. In fact I only used Pianoteq 8 in the past for everything I do. But after playing V9 I found V8 flat and unrealistic :sweat_smile:. I’m such a simple guy :partying_face:

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Have you tried V9? Surprisingly one of the things I like the most is hardly advertised: the thunder pedal. The only thing it does is adding a few more dynamic layers louder than ff

VSL Fazioli F308 (full version) and VI labs Modern D just leave Pianoteq in the dust if you ask me (please don’tšŸ˜€)

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precisely - that’s now my favourite piano.

Pianoteq 9 does seem a little less tinny and with more depth. I don’t know if I can be bothered to fork out the €29 upgrade as for most things I prefer other pianos (in fact, despite its limitations, the Etude Elements does very nicely for one particular work of mine).

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I’m not a trained mixing engineer. But even my untrained ear hears a bit only subtle difference between both versions. And adding more ā€œvelocity layersā€ via the thunder pedal makes a huge difference too. I highly encourage everyone to try the demo.

btw I still hear, that sampled pianos sound more realistic. But I have not found one that I like to play as much as Pianoteq.

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Pianoteq has always been very playable and generally well behaved– which is one reason I got it in the first place (even though I’m not really a pianist myself) but for listening to renderings of my own music at any rate, I nearly always find a sampled piano which simply has more character.

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The piano sounds aside, I ran v8 and v9 in immediate succession, and on my system (Apogee Element 46 audio I/O, Focal satellites and sub) the noise floor was much lower in v9. A nice change.

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I just made the free upgrade since I bought Pianoteq 8 last November. I’d been on the fence for years and finally bought it, and am glad I did. I had been using the pretty nice Radical Piano rack extension in Reason, which is pretty realistic, but Pianoteq is definitely better. I redid a lot of my prior audio files using a Bƶsendorfer, and those things are on Bandcamp and sound quite good. On the other hand, I generally silence the key up and pedal noises, since they just don’t sound realistic to me in Pianoteq (they were much better in Reason, but also sometimes distracting if I didn’t tone them down). I only just downloaded v9 of Pianoteq but will be curious to compare them. I just flew home from a concert in Brussels that had a piano work of mine on the program and to my ears, a ā€œrealā€ piano will always trump sampling or modeling. But the differences are sometimes marginal at best if the modeling is really good.

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