Hi, I want to install pianoteq and use it with my DP. I have this cable:
http://keyboards-midi.musiciansfriend.com/product/MAudio-USB-Uno-1X1-MIDI-Interface?sku=701379

Can I use it with only my Laptop and a set of speakers connected to the laptop?

thanks for the insight.

Leo.

I do. However, my laptop is a netbook with a NANO VIA processor and although Pianoteq runs, it cannot play all midi files or allow lots of pedal playing without overloading the CPU. Make sure you have a modern, high speed processor for optimum results.
You will also likely have to download asioall to make it work with your sound card.

Thanks a lot. I have a reasonably modern laptop, don't remember the specs right now but I will make the test and let you know the results.

thank you for your comment!

Leo.

I bought a high end gaming laptop specifically to run Pianoteq and only get good latency if I use an external ASIO sound interface (Audiogram 3 for $100). If the latency is more than 10 mS it just doesn't feel right.

I have the same "Uno" MIDI interface. It works well and the activity LED in it is usfull for debugging the setup.

If by "speakers" I you mean "Powered speakers" then the answer is "likely yes". Some notebooks have quite poor built-in audio hardware. The best answer is "try it".

The first test to do is simply to play some MP3 files on the notebook. Maybe you have iTunes? Just click "play" and can you hear the music? Is the quality "good enough"? If so you're good to go.

I'd suggest getting it to work with low-end cheap powered speakers and then upgrade the quality from that point with either or both a better quality audio interface and speakers.

It seems such a waste to go to the effort of using pianoteq and then not using studio-grade audio equipment. But technically it should work and make noise with a $20 pair of speakers plugged into the notebook.

Good point.

The following is a post I made on the Pianoteq site that may illustrate Chris's point:

"Over the past two days, I have witnessed the failure of my PCI soundcard, an EMU 1820M (with mastering grade converters). It's four years old, and at that time, there wasn't a better, reasonably priced card on the market. And when working properly, it easily still holds its own.

I always knew it produced great sound, but when it completely blew up (a couple of capacitors leaked) and in desperation I enabled the onboard Realtek device, I found out how great the difference was.

Listening to my own recordings played through the onboard sound, things are falling into place.

What a TERRIBLE sound - I'd be frustrated with Pianoteq too if I had to rely on my computer's onboard chip. I'm listening to a wave file that had great sound two nights ago, and I can barely tolerate it."

Glenn

OK, I tried with my laptop and the program works really bad. Maybe is the cheap MIDI cable, maybe the sound card or maybe my Lap's processor but each time I start the program its like a coin toss, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. Sometimes I need to unplug and re plug the MIDI cables to make it work. In the rare case that the program starts working right away, after a few keystrokes it stops working, or when I press a pedal in the piano and release it, the program hold the pedal down in my PC screen, and the same happens with the keys when I press several keys in a fast succession. They just stick and after a few minutes the program stops working and I have to close it and open it again.

i will try with an old version of pianoteq, maybe it needs less processor speed or I don't know, just to see what happens, I'm gonna try.

I'll keep you posted with my results.

Leo:

Have you approached Pianoteq about the problems? I may get chastised for saying it (on this site), but you will likely get more help on the Pianoteq forum or help line where this problem is more often dealt with.

Glenn

Sounds like your laptop may not be powerful enough or there may be other processes running.
If my netbook is doing anything else (like download an update) then pianoteq will not work at all and will give me the same kind of problems you mention.

Setting up a laptop for a virtual instrumnet can be frustrating, and it can sometime takes some experimentation to get it set-up. I had latency problems using a similar USB midi interface which I cured by installing
a firewire card in my PCMCIA slot, then installing a firewire midi/audio interface with the corresponding driver.
The firewire card was about $20 on Ebay, and I also found a used Tascam Fireone interface on Ebay for $100.
That set-up work perfectly with no noticable latency and offers a dramatic sound improvment over the internal laptop sound card.
Pianoteq 3 is also a noticable improvment over the 2.3 version.
B3

It could just as likely be the soundcard, as the CPU. If you're trying to run MIDI/audio software through the stock standard laptop soundcard, I wouldn't imagine it'd work too well at all. They're not cut out for it. Pianotek probably expects a pro audio interface. I use a MOTU Ultralite MKII which is great, before that I had an M-Audio Delta 1010, even the entry level, and reasonably cheap (but still in the pro audio bracket) sound cards run rings around default laptop sound card.

Also. USB is never the best solution. That's not to say it can't work. But if you have a soundcard that has a real midi interface (ie the standard MIDI cable jack, looks a bit like XLR cable), definitely opt for that.

I've just discovered the Linux version of Pianoteq and, while it's fantastic, it uses 30-50% of full CPU resource on my top-spec quad-core desktop computer. I haven't got around to trying it on my laptop yet, but I'm not expecting miracles. Marvellous though it is, PT need a _lot_ of grunt to get good results.

Timidity, although it doesn't sound anywhere near as good, is quite acceptable for many purposes, and only uses 7% of CPU at full workload (on my quad-core). So if PT doesn't work on my laptop, I guess I have that as a fall-back position. After all, that's what I used for piano in the days before I had an acoustic Piano -- a Roland stage keyboard, a laptop, and a hifi system.

kevin: Have you tried selecting an option other than "recording" from the drop down at the bottom middle of the screen where you can setup mic positions and action?

I have to admit that I only discovered Pianoteq yesterday, when I was told there was a Linux version. So I'm not sure what all those settings do. By chaning from `Sound recording' to `Mono' I can get the CPU usage down to about 20%, but with a corresponding loss of... well.. something. Not sure what. But it sounds best when it's really chewing on the CPU

For the record, I just tried the 64-bit Linux version of PT on my laptop and it works just fine. With an external soundcard and a decent amp and speakers it's a very acceptable way to get a piano sound.

But I should point out that this is a brand-new laptop (literally - I got it last week) and it's got a dual-core 1.4GHz CPU and 3Gb RAM. And even then it uses 80% CPU when worked hard. So I rather suspect that budget laptops will struggle a bit. And I imagine that prolonged use at 80% CPU will eat the battery pretty quickly

Mono is short for monophonic, all the other settings are stereo.

BTW my 2.66GHz quad core (3 years old) rarely gets above 16% CPU usage (maxes out at 20%) when playing the Chopin Waltz Op70 No1 midi that comes with Pianoteq. That's with default settings. Make sure "use multicore rendering is switched on in options, it may only be using one core!

If you find your computer is struggling you can drop the sample rate and polyphony without the sound suffering significantly.

Well, my computers aren't struggling -- I don't care if it uses 100% CPU. After all, I'm not going to be doing anything else with the computer while I'm playing the piano

I was just suggesting a possible explanation for why people might have had problems with PT on their laptop. Whatever settings I use, PT eats a lot more CPU than sample-based software synths I'm familiar with.

My dual core Athlone is four years old plus, and the maximum CPU usage I get is about 25 percent.

If people are having trouble with Pianoteq's CPU usage, they probably have other problems - like apps running in the background that they aren't aware of. There are a number of music specific adjustments and settings in Windows that can really improve performance.

Another very common problem is that the soundcard (PCI type)is sharing an IRQ with something else.

For those still having trouble, try using the headphone output - Recording mode uses four mics and is quite hungry.

Glenn

PS - there is much to learn with Pianoteq, and beginners will stumble around for a while. I've been at it for over a year, and I'm still experimenting and learning.

I'm sure that isn't the case here (although I don't use Windows, so I'm not sure how Windows users would be affected). I've attached the first few lines of the output of `top' on my Linux machine, although I appreciate that only geeks like me are likely to be interested. But you can see that the four CPUs are loaded 12%, 11%, 10%, and 1% of overall system capacity, making ~40% in all. And you can see that PT is the _only_ process consuming CPU.

As I said, I'm not sure that this would work out the same on Windows -- and in any case the results aren't really comparable as the way that CPU load is measured is probably different. My quad-core is quite happy with this sort of CPU loading, but most of the settings changes that I make (in the couple of hours I've had the software) which have reduced the loading have also reduced the sound quality.





==================

tasks: 173 total, 1 running, 172 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 12.1%us, 5.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 82.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 11.5%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 87.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 9.8%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 89.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 1.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3634088k total, 3455948k used, 178140k free, 402088k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 1802352k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
12008 kevin 20 0 314m 109m 3760 S 41.2 3.1 1:58.66 Pianoteq35 Tria
2265 root 20 0 621m 39m 11m S 1.0 1.1 42:01.61 X
2580 kevin 20 0 57176 22m 10m S 0.7 0.6 4:16.41 gnome-terminal
11693 kevin 20 0 2492 1092 820 R 0.3 0.0 0:02.00 top
.... etc

The onboard sound chip of a laptop (or desktop, for that matter) computer is remarkably good at straightforward sound reproduction (if Glenn is noticing a HUGE difference between his Emu card and an AC97 chip, I suspect other issues). But it isn't suitable for playing a virtual instrument in real time.

But before spending out on an additional audio interface, investigate ASIO4ALL http://www.asio4all.com . This is a universal ASIO driver, providing low-latency performance with even the most lowly onboard sound chip. Trying it is a no-brainer as it's free!

Don't worry about the MIDI interface. Anything available today will just work, as will a direct USB MIDI implementation. There is no issue with MIDI latency, just audio latency.

Unfortunately the user who bought a "high end gaming laptop" spent a lot of his budget on a powerful video system. Required for gaming, but quite irrelevent to audio. And, afaik, however much you spend on a laptop, you'll still get the same onboard sound chip.

Kevin,

When combining cpu usage between multiple cores, you average. This is equivalent to about 8.7% CPU utilization.

With the options you've chosen to run this command, the 41% figure that you see on the second line is 41% of the equivalent of a single core, not the entire CPU. 100% utilization of all 4 cores would be listed there as 400%.

edit to add: I believe Windows tallies up total usage of all cores - so a 25% Windows utilization would show up there as 100%.

Rich