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 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.