Native Instruments Akoustik Piano

I've been using the Native Instruments Akoustik Piano virtual instrument for about a year and I have come to know it as one of the best virtual acoustic pianos out there. It was easy to install and doesn't take to long to figure out what everything does. The interface is laid out smartly and everything is right there for you to get a ton of different types of acoustic piano sounds. Having all the presets there is a huge plus as there are a ton of great pre made sounds in this. I run this virtual instrument both as a stand alone piece of software and in Apple Logic. It always runs smoothly for me when I run this on my Mac Book Pro that has a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GBs of RAM. While I always like to use a real acoustic piano when I can, if that is not an option having Native Instruments Akoustik Piano is a huge asset as it give me a great sound in the box that I can control via a MIDI controller and edit like I would MIDI. It also has a built in metronome and the ability to play audio files that you can play along with. The price is reasonable, especially if you buy this as part of Native Instruments Komplete bundle of virtual instruments. The virtual piano in the interface sets the scene for a real simulation of an acoustic piano. I love the sound quality of this pedal and the price is definitely worth it for what I am trying to do. It is versatile in terms of the different piano sounds and has always run faithfully for me. Overall, I definitely recommend Native Instruments Akoustik Piano for those who want a great sounding piano inside of the box.

I have been using this piano sample player for about 4 months. This thing is great! It is probably the most realistic piano software I have used. I first used it in the studio my band recorded at because their piano was pretty out of tune, and they couldn't get it tuned in time. I was worried this would sound really fake, but it actually came out totally realistic on the piano parts we had. I ended up getting it myself for my home studio. There is a lot of versatility available. You can choose from different pianos, change the EQ, change the width, change how far the "mics" are from the piano, change the environment it is in. With these options it's way easier to get a piano part to fit into your song. It also responds very well to dynamics, thanks to good sampling at different volumes. It was a little bit of a pain to get this installed on my Dell system with Cubase, though. The install takes a long time, and registration is a little bit complicated. It is definitely worth the wait and the small amount of hassle there though. After getting it on my system, I haven't had any problems with it. It does use a large amount of memory as you would expect, so you can't usually run more than one of these at a time depending on your computer. It doesn't really seem to use that much processor power, it mostly just taxes your ram. Since it uses so much ram you might not be able to use it on a laptop for live purposes with a MIDI keyboard, but it is great in a studio where you dont have a good piano available. It is a little bit expensive, but it's so worth it. It is a great value if you want a versatile, realistic sounding piano software. I would make the same choice again.