Univers Sons / Ultimate Sound Bank has updated the free UVI Workstation to v1.0.12 and announced the release of a new UVI Soundpack: Acoustic Grand Piano.

Changes in UVI Workstation v1.0.12:

• [Fix] Now works flawlessly in Protools 7.4 and above.
• [Fix] Now display correctly RSS feed in Japanese and with accentuated characters.
• [Imp] Disabling latch mode now kills running voices.
• [Fix] Some MIDI assignation was not remembered.
• [Imp] Some CPU optimization.
• [Imp] Better offline rendering detection.

Acoustic Grand Piano ($59)
About Acoustic Grand Piano, Alain Etchart, Founder and Director of Marketing at Univers Sons / Ultimate Sound Bank says: "Acoustic Piano features surely one of the best sounding sampled pianos in the market. True to our beliefs, we don't think it's about figures (like velocity , memory, number of mikes) but about feeling. A good sounding piano is a rare alchemy between the instrument, the acoustic in the recording studio, the microphones and above all, the engineer's taste. This piano is not our first endeavour, in fact it's the fourth, so we got the chance to see the "magic" thing happen."

"First, we had to find the right instrument. Then we solicited two different classical and jazz pianists, both outstanding concert performers, to give us a hand finding the ideal one. After some research and like dozens of piano reviewed, we found an amazing sounding Steinway D that all our consultants loved. Then we booked for several days one of the best recording studios in Europe (www.guillaumetell.com). We did have to transport the "colossus" to the recording room, and start the tuning work. Once again we took the best qualified person for that essential part of the process."

"After testing tons of microphones amongst the world's best ones and looking for the right placings, every single note was carefully multi-sampled at multiple velocity levels for both normal playing and with the sustain pedal pressed. Thanks to the UVI Engine advanced keygroup layers and rule switching, the sustain pedal and release samples perform and "feel" like a real piano."

"At the end of the process, during the editing of samples, a great instrumentalist was consulted to test the result of this work, then the programming has been improved to make this an instrument really enjoyable and close to the real thing."