Can anyone tell me if Ivory software is viable with a Yamaha YDP-131 digital piano. Is it expensive and do I need a lot of added expense in setting it up.

Ivory runs on your PC, so as long as you can connect your piano to a PC (i.e. your piano has either MIDI or USB connectors), it will work.

Ivory costs $300. You'll also need a low latency audio card (I'm using Audiophile 192, but there's also cheaper Audiophile 2496), which is another $100 or so. Then you'll need to upgrade your PC to 2 Gigabytes of ram - which is about $100 per Gigabyte. Ivory also recommends a separate hardrive for storing the samples, so add $50.

So depending on your currend PC hardware, it will cost you anywhere between $300 to $600.

Eternal, I guess that I will be using Ivory through a laptop as the PC is upstairs and has become the household internet box. Can you suggest what processing power I need in a laptop?
Do you need to run a speaker/amplifier system off your laptop? How is the speaker system connected? Thanks for your advice.

The laptop would have to be very powerful. The hard drives on laptops tend to be very slow and small. Also 2GB Ram should be the minimum.

You'd be very disappointed with Ivory if you don't get your computer's specs right.

You can connect the laptop to a low latency sound card or Audio interface(I use M-Audio's firewire solo which is connected directly to a pair of behringer Truths B2031A monitors/speakers).

Like Doc99 mentioned - I don't know about using a laptop. According to Ivory - you'll need at least 2GHz processor, besides the 2GB of RAM already mentioned. You can't really compromise on the hardware here, because you'll end up with unusable setup.

You may be better off purchasing another PC that's dedicated for the piano only, with no extra processes/services running on it - that's the approach I'm going with.

As far as speakers - since Ivory plays the music on your laptop - you can use your laptop speakers (though don't expect great sound quality there). You can also feed the sound from your laptop back to your piano speakers, but in order for that to be possible your laptop needs to have a line out (not very common for laptops), and your piano needs to have a line in.

Gilbert,

You might want to check out this link:

http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/topic/6/3032.html

It may help answer some of your questions.