The Sound Board

Impact Soundworks has announced the 2.0 release of the Pearl Concert Grand:

Our flagship Yamaha C7 grand piano PEARL has been updated to v2.0 based on your feedback and requests! We've completely re-scripted this Kontakt Player instrument from the ground up, adding full NKS support, more realistic pedaling behavior, and per-note editing for features like velocity curves, brightness, ADSR, and microtuning.

https://impactsoundworks.com/product/pe ... ert-grand/

It's currently on sale for $79, down from $119. The update is free for existing Pearl owners.

I was pretty hard on this library with the 1.3 release -- even did a blathering and fumbling 40+ minute video on Youtube where I pointed out all the things that annoyed me about it -- but I'm very happy to say that a lot of my complaints were dispatched in this release.

Pedalling behavior is substantially improved and many of the notes with intolerable noise buildups have been considerably tamed. Their previous dodgy half-pedaling and catch-pedaling system has been replaced with a much better facsimile of an acoustic's behavior. It's still not quite right -- what sample-based virtual instrument is? -- but it's vastly improved and in my opinion has firmly moved into acceptable territory for a sampled piano.

There's something a little wonky with the releases to my ears, especially when the samples are left to build up as with that example. (Doesn't appear to be related to reaching a voice limit.)

But overall this is a very welcome upgrade indeed. Great work, Andrew and team!

Care to post a MIDI file for that example so we can take a closer look at it?

EvilDragon wrote: ↑Sep 12, 2018 2:50 am Care to post a MIDI file for that example so we can take a closer look at it?

Sure, MIDI is here. Also rendered with VintageD for comparison.

Thanks. Will forward to relevant personnel

By the way, default patch, or one of factory snapshots? Or your own settings? How's release set on the Response page? And on Advanced page, what's the volume for sustained and pedalled releases? Feel free to tweak there.

Or... did you by any chance disable repedalling? Seems we found a buglet there (envelope release isn't working when repedalling is disabled).

I won't be in front of my DAW until later today but from memory it was the default full 16-bit patch with out of the box settings except I did dial back the half pedal decay rate (or whatever it's called) as I found it felt a bit too aggressive. Once I'm home I'll follow up with all the exact settings and try some more tweaking.

Nabeel noticed you're using continuous pedal, and on those last notes it's a rather slow release on it, so the code was adjusted so that continuous pedal doesn't release things faster than the actual release time of ADSR. Should help.

Update for this should be pushed now.

EvilDragon wrote: ↑Sep 14, 2018 10:25 am Update for this should be pushed now.

Wow, that was fast!

But do you mean that I should see a new version (like 2.0.1 or whatever), or the existing 2.0 zip file was updated to include an update? (It doesn't seem to have been updated at least.)

Thanks!

Honestly I'm not sure there. I think the update file got updated.