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Hello Digital Gurus,

I'm a novice at this MIDI and VST stuff, so forgive me in advance if I say something dumb.

I want to set up my YDP223 so it plays tones generated by PC software, in real time, instead of from the built in tone generator. I thought that was possible but now I'm starting to wonder.

Here's what I've done so far: I downloaded the Cantible demo program for hosting VST, and a VST plugin called MDA Piano. I hooked up my MIDI-to-USB cable and verified the computer receives signals from the piano and the piano can play MIDI output generated by the computer. But the only way the piano will play the VST tones rather than it's own tones is if I bypass MIDI output and connect the computer's headphone jack to the piano's aux in. Unfortunately that produces an unacceptable delay that would prohibit real time playing.

I'm starting to think what I want to do is impossible, because the piano has no way of actually generating tones using the computer's samplings.

Can anyone comment on whether what I want to do is possible, and if so let me know where I've gone astray?

Thanks!

there might be a setting on your 223 which indicates whether sound is on/off locally. my pf500 has it and if i turned it off, then it will play through speakers connected to PC. i do use usb port to connect the PC though.

the latency may be inevitable if your sound card on your PC is not optimal. people would replace their sound card with low latency one so that the sound delay would be ignorable.

btw, if you're interested in tone generator other than your piano, then you might be interested in 'Pianoteq' (pianoteq.com), which has a thread going on here.

The computer generates the sound, so the sound comes from the computer, not the piano. That's why you need to connect the computer back to the piano if you want to hear the sound through the piano's speakers.

As signa said, you need to have a soundcard with low latency. Latency is the delay between your piano sending a MIDI message to the computer and the computer producing the sound.

(There is no noticable delay going from the headphones out to the piano speakers, nor can you speed up the MIDI messages.)

The only thing you *can* do is reduce the buffer size of the soundcard. You can do that in Cantabile Lite under Tools, Options, Audio Driver. There is a slider for Buffer Size. Lower it to get a smaller delay.

However, your soundcard may have a limit to how low it can go and therefore you may not be able to reduce the delay to something workable. The only solution is to buy a soundcard with an ASIO driver.

Thanks guys, that's kind of what I thought. Guess I'll just live with my tinny sound in real time and see what I can do to fix up recordings by using different midi tones.

I use a Creative Labs X-fi soundcard (the original XtremeMusic) and it allows me to do ASIO with a 5ms delay, which is just about perfect and is nearly impossible to detect. It could actually go lower if my computer were faster. Actually, you may want to check to see if your sound supports ASIO (there's also a library called ASIO4ALL I've heard of that may make older stuff work w/ ASIO, but I'm not sure).

On my system, I use the Galaxy Steinway DXi plugin and run it through Reaper -- it sounds absolutely fantastic in real time. The Galaxy is a BIG sample though, I had to upgrade to 3GB of RAM in order to smooth it out. Now I'm looking for a better keyboard to play it with.

I think anything under 10ms is good enough, but even less is obviously better.

ASIO4ALL can make non-ASIO soundcards work with software that requires ASIO but I don't believe it will give you lower latency than your soundcard can handle.

I just created a midi file and ran it thru SynthFont into an MP3 using the WST Steinway plugin, and I was blown away by the improvement in sound. My recording problem is solved. As much as I'd like to have that sound all the time, I'm not ready to upgrade my sound card and ram, so that's going to have to do until I can afford a new piano.

Thanks again to all on this thread for your wisdom and advice.

Yep, if you don't need to have those sounds in real-time while you're playing then recording as MIDI and using a SoundFont or VSTi to make an MP3 later will work even on old computers.