Part 3
Dickiefunk.. Ok we have established that there are methods to reduce the risk of purchasing something that you will regret buying, and improve the chances that what you purchase will be suitable for you.
A few of the sampled piano libraries allow you to demo them 100% fully functional, before you buy.
The two I am aware of are :
1. Waves Rhapsody (and the other electroacoustic pianos from Waves have this same feature, but we are focussing obviously on acoustic pianos here) - with a 7 day demo license - you can install using Waves Central, and fully demo Waves Rhapsody which is a sampled Fazioli, and see what you think of it.
2. At the top end of the scale, the most expensive piano libraries in the world, from Vienna Symphonic Library. You may be able to obtain a demo license which lasts at least a week, so please contact them and explore this possibility. You will need to purchase a hardware dongle - a USB key (or if you already have a dongle for a Steinberg product, that will be all you need). A new dongle is about £20 or less, including postage. And hopefully if you can obtain a demo license there are at least 6 well sampled pianos from VSL, which you may request to demo.
One of the final issues with piano libraries, which I have already mentioned is proper matching of MIDI velocities from your keyboard controller to the sample layers in the product.
With a digital piano, there is a greater opportunity to improve this matching, since the keybed and samples are provided by the same manufacturer, and developed together as part of the same product.
With samples, they have no clue what kind of controller you are using, and what your finger strength is. The wild wild west. This mismatch is responsible for the vast majority of issues with sampled libraries.
For most piano sampled libraries, there is no way to set the velocity mapping independently, so that every time you call up the piano, you do not have to again set this mapping when you use it in another project. Sure the mapping is saved in whatever DAW project you used it in, but this becomes difficult to transfer to another project, unless you use intermediaries such as saved presets in your DAW.
I have been using an amazing freeware tool, which is available for Windows and Mac, called PizMidi - google it, and download the most recent version, which comes from 2012. Within this collection is an excellent MIDI plugin which you place before your piano plugin, called MidiCurve, and with this you can set your preferred MIDI velocity mapping curve, and save this as presets, for each piano library, independently of whatever mapping tools are provided in each library.
The advantage of this is rather than have different methods of adjusting MIDI mapping, across various piano libraries, you use just one, which you become most familiar with, and better at using, and the same skillset is applied to ALL your piano libraries, typically you create one preset for each library, the 1st time you use it, and then call up that preset in MidiCurve the next time you need it.
Please remember to back up the MidiCurve presets, so you do not have to go through the pain of setting velocities, in the event you have to reinstall your computer.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/pizmidi/downloads
Best wishes, happy piano sample hunting.