MAC AU x86 x64 – 2,03 GB | MAC VST x86 x64 – 2,03 GB | MAC AAX – 2,03 GB
WiN VST x86 x64 – 2,03 GB | WiN AAX – 2,04 GB
Austrian Grand piano was sampled from a 100 year old Bruder Mikula Wien Austrian grand through a pair of AEA R84 ribbon microphones into an AEA TRP ribbon microphone preamp. Prior to recording, the piano’s hammer felts were sanded down to warm them up a bit. The piano was sampled in stereo under the lid, because that’s where the tone sounded best. It took many weeks to sample the piano entirely, as it was in such a state that most of the tuning pegs could no longer hold a pitch for any length of time. The piano was sampled laboriously, with the softest to loudest dynamics being played, resulting in a library that includes 10 velocity layers and 2 note round-robin.
Sampling originally began by recording through an additional pair of Oktava Mk-012’s to capture room ambience, but early on it was determined that the piano’s tone was best captured by the ribbon mics, and that potentially increasing the size of the sample library by several gigabytes to include room mics would not significantly improve the sound.
Do to high-gain signal-noise unique to ribbons, quite a bit of noise was present when building the sample library. Noise from the ribbons is negligible, but when stacking 30-40 notes on top of each other – as in a sample library – the noise compounds and becomes quite noticeable. Therefore, the extra step of de-noising the samples was taken. Noise wasn’t removed completely – to avoid making the sample library sterile – and a faint “hiss” (similar to tape hiss) can be heard if you listen to the library carefully. For some people, a litte noise is desirable, but it can further be reduced by engaging the “4kHz cut” switch, as this is where most of the microphone self-noise tends to propagate.
This virtual instrument can be a great addition to your collection, as it fills a nice niche between bright sterile pianos (like Yamaha’s) and smooth, mellow pianos (like Faziolis). We were happy we could sample such an old piano and turn it into a unique VST AAX Audio Unit plugin.
The Kontakt version of Adam Monroe’s Austrian Grand Piano is now depreciated (1/9/2020). The VST, Audio Unit, and AAX versions are programmed entirely by us. The goal in any sample library that is also a VSTi (virtual instrument), Audio Unit (AU), or AAX plugin is to attempt to match the performance of the Kontakt Player. With this library, we feel like we have done just that.
The VST, AU, and AAX versions include updated, high-performance algorithms that have been improving with each new virtual instrument released by Adam Monroe Music. For example, the buffering algorithm is double-buffered and multithreaded, which means that buffering performance is fast, even on slower computers, and even in lower latencies. Voices are held and iterated over in a pure, C-Style array. Memory use is comparable to the (depreciated) Kontakt version. Because of the solid VST/Audio Unit/AAX code base, you can feel confident that the VST, AU, and AAX Unit versions will work just as well as the Kontakt version.
Why develop a VST, Audio Unit, or AAX version at all? Although a great piece of software, the Full version of Kontakt (required to run 3rd party sample libraries) is expensive (or the developer has to pay a licensing fee to Native Instrumetns). And essentially, Kontakt is middleware. Developing VST, Audio Unit, and AAX versions that anyone can use in any DAW does not add significant time to the development of a piano sample library – most of the time is spent sampling and processing the samples – so it’s a real no-brainer.
Audio engineering is a large part of creating a VST, Audio Unit, or AAX plugin, but the sounds of this grand piano have barely been processed. A little of the mid and high frequencies were rolled back in the piano’s lower range, and the samples were de-noised, but other than that, this library is nearly a direct translation of the sound of a 100-year-old Austrian Grand Piano.
This plugin now supports real-time sample rate conversion via cubic interpolation with Catmull-Rom splines. As long as you are using a 44.1, 48, 88.2, or 96 kHz sample rate, the plugin will automatically detect your sample rate and adjust itself accordingly.
– 16-Bit Audio Samples
– 2X Round-Robin, 10 Velocity Layers
– Reverb and Frequency Cuts
– 5GB of Sample Data
– Supports 44.1, 48, 88.2, and 96 kHz
Release v1.7 1/4/2020
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Improvements since last versoin:
*Mac Au/VST versoins now conform to OS X Catalina code siqninq and notarizatoin reguirements.
*Mac versoins are now installed via packaqe installers.
*Resources for Mac versoins and a confiq file are now placed outside of the amhonky.vst and amhonky component bundles. This is because Apple wants thinqs code-siqned now:
verifyinq resources in a bundle would take too lonq and the confiq can’t be inside because it would invalidate the code siqnature. If you don’t like it, complain to Apple!
*Maintaininq separate leqacy (32-bit) Mac versoins for those who need
them (OS X 10.9-10.14)
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