Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Computer software

I'm just about to take delivery of my first piano. It has a USB connection to connect to computers and phones. I have a PC and android phone. I am wondering what software you would suggest to use this connection to its full potential? I am clueless what real use I will get out of this connection. Any ideas would be great. Thanks

In PC you can use virtual instruments: https://www.pianoteq.com/ and http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys/definitive-piano-collection/ for example. There are other such as Ivory, UVI, VSL and EWQL.

You can also use it to play other virtual instruments that are not pianos, check the rest of Native Instruments offerings for example.

Many virtual instruments work "stand alone" but others need a host, this host are normally "DAW" or Digital Audio workstation, programs used for composition, arranging, sound design, mixing and mastering. There are many DAW around: Logic (if you have a mac), Ableton Live, Cubase, Reason, Studio One, Reaper, Bitwig and protool (the industry standard for recording).

Prices vary, there is something for every budget.

Also consider that you need a decent computer and in PC an audio interface (one made by pro audio equipment) is recommended to achieve lower latency. Also to hear what you are doing in your computer Studio monitors are recommended.

Which piano did you select?. Some require you to install driver software in order to use the piano keyboard as an input device over USB. Others make use of Windows or Mac OSX's class compliant MIDI driver and are recognized upon connection - what you might call plug and play. Both of those operating systems are superior to Android at the moment for hosting software instruments and delivering low latency reliable performance during play. They also obviously have the most options with regard to software applications.

If you want to use your PC, an audio interface is essential as login suggests.

Here's a minimum setup I'd recommend.

PC...Quad-Core CPU with at least 8GB of RAM and SSD.
Audio Interface...Ask anyone for recommendation but you could grab something that matches your need for around $200 or so.
Headphones...For monitoring.

Software piano instruments work by playing back each recorded "samples" (another name for audio files), so the more the processing power that you PC has, the more you'll be comfortable playing the instruments. Realtime playback and processing takes a lot of processing power, but anything with the above recommended spec should be able to handle software piano instruments without audio dropouts/glitches. I'd personally won't consider doing anything with Android phones for that matter.

Regards to the type of software instruments, you need to be care of what you choose as there are instruments that require "Full-Version of Kontakt" which is a paid software that costs around $500. So you'd want to select something that says "Kontakt Player Compatible" (Kontakt Player is a freeware version of Kontakt, but some instruments won't work on it) or UVI or other format that doesn't require another software to run.

To take further advantage of the use of a PC, you could use DAW to record your piano plays, and render them as a wave file, or even produce a track with other sounds, but that's a whole another story.

Out of the box the USB MIDI connection can be used to record yourself on the PC and play your recordings back through the piano. You don't need powerful PC for this and no additional hardware at all.

Something like https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/ can MIDI record everything you play automatically without you having to press a button each time. Though the free version (Lite) can't actually do that.

Using a free MIDI sequencer like http://ariamaestosa.sourceforge.net/ you could manually record yourself and then edit the notes you just recorded, remove errors you made and play along to your recordings.

The possibilities are endless...