Check out pianobook.co.uk for “The Experience”, a series of large but fantastic sample libraries (up to 7GB recorded from different perspectives with up to 7 layers per key) of Yamaha, Fazioli and Steinway Grand Pianos a.o. Libraries are available in several formats, but as far as I know each one is available for sforzando at least.

Another fantastic (and way smaller) VST Piano is OT-Piano S – very flexible high quality plugin based on the famous Salamander sample library with great UI at 1GB.

ups, two years later…

now it will work again

this is such a brilliant idea. Now i can run either patch without problems on my 4 gb laptop! thank you. I used reaper for converssion but the concept is exactly the same.

HELLO,BEDROOMPRODUCERSBLOG.COM
I CANT CONTACT THEM. CAUSE THERES NO CONTACT ON THEIR SITE.
ZARYHM RAIDER COPIED THIS SAMPLE LIBRARY WITHOUT GETTING PERMISSION.
AND HE MAKE IT AS A SOUNDFONT AND PRODUCE IT AS HE MAKE IT OWN.

Convert the .flac samples to high quality (~350 kbps) .ogg files (a lossy compressed format supported by sfz).
After converting, the Ambient and Close samples each only take up ~850 MB .

#1. For Flac to Ogg batch conversion (took 1 hour), I used:

SoX
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/14.4.1/sox-14.4.1a-win32.zip/download

A. unzip Sox to folder (i.e. Desktop\sox)
B. open cmd prompt in folder containing the sfz mappings (samples are in subfolder(s))
C. at cmd prompt enter: FOR /R %I IN (*.flac) DO c:\Users\greg\sox\sox “%I” -C9 “%~pnI.ogg”
D. Wait a while (~ 45 min?)

#2. Replace all “.flac” entries in both the Ambient and Close sfz mappings to “.ogg”.

#3. Open in plogue Sforzando (or other sfz player) and enjoy with RAM to spare.

-Greg

@Mark

Are you maybe using the Ambience Set of the Samples? The Close Set sounds allright to me, the Ambience one is of course a bit quieter and “darker” sounding. Using it in Cubase 6.5 and I cannot reproduce your complaint.

@Simon

In your Kontakt version from the screenshot it seems like one can mix the Ambience and the Close Samples. Is something like this realizable in SFZ (generally asking) or is this one of those things where SFZ reaches it’s limits? Just curious to know!

Hi there. Thanks for downloading the library!

I admit the samples are a bit quieter than they probably should be. I left them almost exactly as they were recorded, which maybe wasn’t actually the best idea. If you need more volume, try putting something like an equalizer or compressor on the instrument channel, then using the volume or gain function of that plugin.

Problems like these are why the library is free. I’ve learned a ton in the process of building and distributing this thing, and future libraries will require much less updating and fiddling.

Let me know if you have any other questions or recommendations!

Haha no problem, and you’re very welcome! Feel free to send me anything you write using the library. I’m always looking for more demos to stick on the website and I love hearing what other people come up with.