Audio examples and 40-day demo can be downloaded from the company's web site (see 'Pricing' box). Included in the price is a year's worth of downloadable Module updates: the Sapphire Module was new in October 2007, and further new Modules are promised. The output is free of room ambience, so you can add processing according to your needs. The interface is simple, with each basic piano sound ('Module') offering a number of sonic variations ('Presets') along with straightforward keyboard dynamics, tuning reference and note release controls. Recommended CPU specs are a 2.5GHz single-core or 1.5GHz multi-core PC, or a Power PC G5 or Intel multi-core Mac, with neither needing more than 256MB RAM. True Pianos offers three basic piano sounds of unspecified provenance ('Diamond', 'Emerald' and 'Sapphire'), with excellent polyphony and modelled sympathetic resonance, despite the slim file size (75MB for Diamond). This buyer's guide aims to make the task of choosing a suitable instrument quicker and easier, as well as providing a Jargon Buster (see page 182) to get you up to speed with the necessary piano-related technical terms. There are lots of contenders to choose from, each with its own slant favouring certain applications. Nothing can quite match the sound of a real grand, and elsewhere in this issue we explore methods of recording one, but in practice a lot of home studio owners find sample sets or virtual instruments a more practical option. If recording a real piano isn't for you, there's no shortage of very convincing software alternatives.
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