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Might be of interest.

http://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_module_for_ipad/

Wow! That looks really cool! Thanks for the heads up. I'm fascinated that they've made a deal with synthogy to offer the mobile edition of synthogy ivory as an expansion pack.

Nice. Any idea how much it will cost?

There's no pricing yet, but it sounds like they're associating it with the Korg Gadget app, which goes for $38.99.

Great news, thanks! I have been waiting for long time for a decent piano software on the iPad.

Nice, thanks!

If that's really the price i'll have only one thing to say to korg. "Shut up and take my money!"

It seems you have to get the korg app and them the ivory aa an add on.

Hmmm looks promising, but I wonder what latency will be like, and how much expressively can be achieved...

I should gently point out the awesomeness of Kontakt and a full DAW (Studio One) running on my MS Surface Pro 3. They aren't much more than iPads with high capacity and there's no compromise on selection. Still this is pretty neat.

In terms of iPad music applications, I'm late in getting to the table. Can these apps preload samples, or parts of samples, into the cache, or are they always having to seek on the hard drive for the samples?

My other question is about sound quality--assuming one hooks up an iPad to a decent sound card, is the sound decent?

Hard drive?? OK.... iPads only have Flash memory and RAM and (yes) they can stream from the Flash (I read that Neosoul keys App does it)

There is no hard drive in an iPad. But there is solid state flash serving the same purpose. As far as I've seen, the iPad can't actually stream directly from that flash. In general, the entire sample set must be small enough to fit into RAM (which is 1 mb in the Retina models, not all of which is available for app use). Which also means there is no cache, as the entire sample set is already in RAM. There are a small number of apps which support larger sets of sample data, but it doesn't seem to be quite the same as what we think of as streaming from disk in a traditional computer system, as the total data sets are still not all that large. From what I can tell, the sample set must still fit in RAM, but it can be compressed (i.e. Apple Lossless format) and decompressed on the fly to allow the use of samples that are somewhat bigger than what would appear to be the available memory. Though it's not entirely clear, see for example http://gospelmusicians.com/ios/ - and I suspect that the Ivory piano for this Korg app will be handled the same way, unless something has changed with iOS 8 that is supporting additional streaming functionality.

Typing before thinking, there. I of course knew that there was no hard drive. Can it cache things from flash, is what I should have said.

Seems quite limited if the flash memory is relatively small.

The flash memory is whatever size you buy, from 16 gb to 128 gb. The problem is that, at least so far it looks like you can't stream from it. The limiting factor, at least so far, seems to be the RAM, which maxes out at 1 gb, with some latitude there if the data you can store there can be compressed, and then decompressed on the fly. (Caching is a non-issue if there is no streaming and all the data has to be in RAM anyway.)

The iPad Air 2 actually has 2GB of RAM, IIRC. Maybe that would account for Korg's claimed 72-voice polyphony on that particular platform as opposed to the earlier iPads?

Ah, I hadn't seen that confirmed before, but it looks like that's right. Cool.

I don't think the polyphony is related to the increased RAM, but to the much higher processor power of the new models

https://www.apple.com/ipad-air-2/performance/
Compared with the A7 chip in the previous iPad Air, the new A8X chip delivers 40 percent faster CPU performance.

Wow, that's twice as much as my Amiga A500!

;-)

I meant 1 gb, of course... But the Amiga was a cool little computer!