Pianobook

[Starise]

One of the founders of Spitfire has an upload site called Pianobook that has over 200 free libraries in it.

Check it out  HERE

You will need to register with pianobook. For kicks I downloaded the Steinway by Jon Meyer. Around 500mb zipped . He used some nice mics to make the captures. For a free piano I think it's really nice. Would sit well in a mix. Even captures some pedal noises. This was just one library of over 200....so I haven't scraped the surface yet.

Apparently the Kontakt full version is required. Looks like NI have a nice crossgrade path  up to K6 from the player version IF you have one of their libraries.  I have a bud looking to get K6. Can anyone point me to a very reasonable library he could use to upgrade? 

I made a short vid of that piano so you could hear it.

 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Starise

[kitekrazy1]

Someone gave it one star.  It sounds good to me.  I find for electronic genres the quality of a piano sound is not as important as the system footprint.  No one really needs to load up their 20GB piano for such things.  Plus these are uncompressed so compress them in Kontakt to make it smaller.

[Matthew Sorrels]

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Apparently the Kontakt full version is required. Looks like NI have a nice crossgrade path  up to K6 from the player version IF you have one of their libraries.  I have a bud looking to get K6. Can anyone point me to a very reasonable library he could use to upgrade? 

Traditionally the cheapest way to get the full version of Kontakt was to get one of the handful of free Kontakt player libraries and use that as the crossgrade.  The trick of course is sometimes NI changes the rules on which of the free Kontakt libraries qualify (if any of them)

In the past I know users have used Sennheiser's DrumMic'A, which can be gotten for free (in the past you had to get through the German language website for registering but that looks like it's changed).  https://en-us.sennheiser.com/drummica

Recently ProjectSAM released a free Kontakt player library, The Free Orchestra.  I'd try that if I were starting from scratch https://projectsam.com/libraries/the-free-orchestra/

There are a few other free Kontakt player libraries (if neither of those two qualify).  There are also a bunch of low priced Kontakt player libraries that will certainly work, though most of those seem to be stuck in the $99 price range.  There are exceptions though, Soundiron has a handful of $39 Kontakt player libraries for example.  https://soundiron.com/collections/kontakt-player-edition-collection  If you are going to go that route it's best if you find a cheap library you'd actually use/want.  But I'd try the free ones first.   You might also want wait for the next sale to buy the crossgrade, NI usually has a summer sale of some sort.

[Starise]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy said:

Someone gave it one star.  It sounds good to me.  I find for electronic genres the quality of a piano sound is not as important as the system footprint.  No one really needs to load up their 20GB piano for such things.  Plus these are uncompressed so compress them in Kontakt to make it smaller.

Yeah,I was expecting it to sound like one star and was surprised. A little EQ work and a nice reverb and I could see this one really shining.I agree that for electronic genre the requirements would probably be a lot less.  Just a narrow mid rangy kind of thing might be fine.

9 minutes ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

Traditionally the cheapest way to get the full version of Kontakt was to get one of the handful of free Kontakt player libraries and use that as the crossgrade.  The trick of course is sometimes NI changes the rules on which of the free Kontakt libraries qualify (if any of them)

In the past I know users have used Sennheiser's DrumMic'A, which can be gotten for free (in the past you had to get through the German language website for registering but that looks like it's changed).  https://en-us.sennheiser.com/drummica

Recently ProjectSAM released a free Kontakt player library, The Free Orchestra.  I'd try that if I were starting from scratch https://projectsam.com/libraries/the-free-orchestra/

There are a few other free Kontakt player libraries (if neither of those two qualify).  There are also a bunch of low priced Kontakt player libraries that will certainly work, though most of those seem to be stuck in the $99 price range.  There are exceptions though, Soundiron has a handful of $39 Kontakt player libraries for example.  https://soundiron.com/collections/kontakt-player-edition-collection  If you are going to go that route it's best if you find a cheap library you'd actually use/want.  But I'd try the free ones first.   You might also want wait for the next sale to buy the crossgrade, NI usually has a summer sale of some sort.

Thanks Matt for these links. I'll check it out.. Yes, If he could find a library he would use that makes the most sense. A free library would be icing on the cake.

I found an NI list for qualifying 3rd party libraries.  HERE

[kitekrazy1]

If you got one of those Sonokinetic free offerings you should be good to go.

[Matthew Sorrels]

If someone really had nothing and just wanted full Kontakt getting a player library and then crossgrading is the best deal.  But honestly with NI things are set up so a better deal is to get a version of Komplete that includes the full Kontakt.  Komplete isn't cheap (though I think there are some cross grade deals) but you do get a ton of great stuff.

Once you have an account at NI if you go to the Kontakt crossgrading order page and are logged in it will tell you if you qualify for the cross-grade offer (and which product it thinks qualifies you).  That list of 3rd party libraries may or may not be "komplete" lol.