Native Instruments Virtual Acoustic Pianos

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.