Topic: Pianoteq and the v-box

While looking at all the new stuff that is coming out during the musicmesse08, I noticed (apart from the amazing new melodyne 2 and it's polyphonic capabilities) the soon to be released V-Box from SMProAudio.

If pianoteq works on it (and I can't see why not), it's a great way of having the best piano sound (after a real one, and even then...) in an easy, quick, affordable and portable solution.

You could easily imagine a great product with a master-keyboard, a v-box and pianoteq, all in one, sending all the super sampled sounds from yam, korg, roland or others miles away in sound sens of view

Just have to wait and see the quality of the D/A converters that SMProAudio will use, and the stability of the product.
But I'm sure it's something to keep an eye one


Matt

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

Yeeees!

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

I really like this idea, but I'm not so sure how much to let myself like it. The problem is partly the economy here in the States--399 Euro's is about $700 US, and the price of laptop computers here, if you shop around for sales and last month's models, has dropped considerably in the past few years. A very respectable notebook is around $500-$600. Of course you also have to buy an additional external sound card with a notebook, but I already have that. The pedal looks still better, since you can edit parameters on it directly, but it's more expensive.

The basic box, regardless, does look good. I assume it's both a processor and a sound card, although I don't see the specs for the sound card in the ads. If it's an excellent sound card, given the specs for the processor and the RAM, the price is probably only a little high, and they have to charge more to make a profit. I'd like it better if the unit had a video out and a usb in for a keyboard, so you just use it almost like a normal computer at home, with the software on the flash drive with your vst's and vsti's.

The advantages are great, though: no external sound card to carry around with a notebook, any sound and effect I could want. Ideally setting parameters would be easy. And we could have PianoTeq everywhere. 

Maybe I'm convincing myself to get one of these by writing this. What do other people think? Has anyone played with one of these?

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

for about 100 € more you get a basic laptop, and even if you don't have another sound card, with ASIO4ALL you can get quite respectable results from the internal soundcard...
And you have a laptop... I would certainly go this route.

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

I've had my eye on Muse Research Receptor for a long time but never made the plunge because it uses a lower end processor (compared to today's pcs).  From a glance, the V-Box has less horsepower than Receptor.

In one of the videos, the guy mentioned that latency is very low, around 1ms or less, he could get it down to 16 samples.  That's pretty impressive, but piano modeling rely heavily on cpu power.

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

In fairness, the SMPro guys say the hardware is equivalent of much more powerful pcs, because it runs a very lean barebones operating system without a GUI. We'll have to see how it holds up with CPU intensive software like the PTQ though.

Also, from what I've gathered, it comes with editor software you install on your regular pc. You set up everything there, and authenticate your licenses etc there, and then transfer the setup on a USB stick to the VBox.

So the question is how this will work with Modartt's type of online license authentication. But I'm sure they will work something out.

I'll definately look out for this unit, and its siblings. I have high hopes for its stability, which of course is the main source of worries when using laptops live. The less OS and auxillary software running, the lesser the risk of a crash. Plus it's highly portable and comes with converters. Nice indeed.

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

Has anybody in the meantime tested the V-Box with Pianoteq?

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

V-box will be in market from september ....... Studio version in 2k9 about february ....

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

Thanks for your reply, however, V-Box seems to be available already in Germany:

http://www.thomann.de/de/sm_pro_audio_v_box.htm

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

No, they say "available on request", so they dont have it.

Rainer

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

You are right! I asked at my local music store and they gave me the same reply.

I have asked at info@smproaudio.de and they replied:

Several messages have been sent to them requesting information about PIANOTEQ. The software developer in Australia is currently testing about 2,000 plugins, of which an estimated 80% should work with V-Box.

In a few weeks time smproaudio is planning to publish the list of compatible plugins on their site. If a plugin is not currently compatible, it may be in the future, since the plugin producer may have to modify their plugin slightly for it to run in V-Box. smproaudio is working closely with all plugin producers to succeed.

smproaudio says that the CPU of the V-Box (which is announced to run at 1 GHz) is comparable to a 2 to 2.4 GHz CPU of a computer with an operating system. The V-Pedal and the V-Rack will be equipped with even faster CPUs.

Re: Pianoteq and the v-box

The subject may be renamed now to V-Machine, as it seems this will be the final name of the device.

Puck01 wrote:

In a few weeks time smproaudio is planning to publish the list of compatible plugins on their site. If a plugin is not currently compatible, it may be in the future, since the plugin producer may have to modify their plugin slightly for it to run in V-Box. smproaudio is working closely with all plugin producers to succeed.

So this is a question more to Modartt if they happened to have any touch with SMBPro. Even if SMBPro will say it does with Pianoteq, it doesn't mean it works well. I'm just afraid of performance of this device.

Puck01 wrote:

smproaudio says that the CPU of the V-Box (which is announced to run at 1 GHz) is comparable to a 2 to 2.4 GHz CPU of a computer with an operating system. The V-Pedal and the V-Rack will be equipped with even faster CPUs.

Hmm.. this seems like a slight ignorance of the SMBPro. First, if the device has x86 processor (I can guess VIA nano ;P) it has an operating system too, so they meant probably GUI not OS. Anyway the GUI doesn't take 50% of CPU power, but just about 1-5%. So the 1GHz may be just not enough.

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