MSoundFactory Meldway Grand - sounds VERY GOOD.

[wpostma]

I own about 50 commercial/paid piano libraries (mostly kontakt libraries) and frankly this one sounds as good as any of the Kontakt ones. It seems to be a very good Steinway, with the name Steinway cleverly disguised. I play piano (adult piano student) and this is my favorite VST Piano sound, I like it better than Pianoteq, and for general (non cinema piano) sounds, even better than NI Noire, which was my favorite until Meldway.

I attempted to share my preset which has the basic meldway grand default mics, but which has a suitable early reflection (delay with stone wall sound) and a nice reverb (the melda reverb selections available in the fx tab for meldway sound quite good, I just dialed it like I like them).
Preset name: Meldway Grand Piano - Hall Reverb Wet


Good work Melda.

Warren

[MeldaProduction]

Thanks Warren, I actually believe it is waaaaay better than the contact ones

[fotisandstuff]

I attempted to share my preset which has the basic meldway grand default mics, but which has a suitable early reflection (delay with stone wall sound) and a nice reverb (the melda reverb selections available in the fx tab for meldway sound quite good, I just dialed it like I like them).
Preset name: Meldway Grand Piano - Hall Reverb Wet

Thank you for the preset, Warren! I tried it and it sounds great!!!

[Underoath77]

I played it against The Maverick, The Grandeur, Una Corda and the Giant. FAR more versatile.

Thanks Warren, I actually believe it is waaaaay better than the contact ones

[Frankie.T]

It's very good and it's crazy what you can achieve with that, the fx are insane!
I made this very short clip, the piano in the background ofc is Meldway

[bmanic]

Thanks Warren, I actually believe it is waaaaay better than the contact ones

This is indeed one of the best ones sound wise but unfortunately it still suffers from the ability to be played on a smaller system like the Mac M1 Mini. Could be the main issue is the RAM but whatever the case, there's a lot of pops and crackles no matter what settings are used. Then again, users over at Gearspace still reported a ton of clicks and crackles on the Mac Studio computers so.. ??

According to Activity Monitor, it does hit way over 100% CPU on a single core very often so the crackles could also be due to not properly optimized for multicore.

This is one area all the "big players" have way more experience with than Melda. Kotakt, UVI, VSL etc all have much better optimized players for large sample sets.

As an example, the largest piano library I have, Mercury Fazioli Grand Piano, the full mega version, runs just fine on this computer without any glitches at all. Kontakt simply works way better for sample streaming and CPU optimization.

So yeah, the sound quality of this library is absolutely undeniably world class (one of the best I've ever heard) but when it can't be reliably played in realtime on my system, I just don't use it.

[wpostma]

> but unfortunately it still suffers from the ability to be played on a smaller system like the Mac M1 Mini

Okay after an hour I see. 8 gb is not gonna work for this 40 gb piano.

I don't believe you can SSD stream a 40 gb piano in realtime without at least 32 gb RAM.

With low settings I can play this instrument on 8 gb, but you have to be careful what options you pick.

[wpostma]

Also of note is that to make the Meldway Grand playable, default MSoundFactory sampler settings are not gonna cut it.

Looks like a better set of settings are Preload 8, 10g max memory.
:

Screenshot 2023-08-13 at 2.34.24 PM.png

Depending on which microphone sets you activate, this thing can be using a lot of data.
And depending on your selected polyphony, I can hear the voice stealing happening but I can't call that a bug.

Also, if I want to stress out a sample based instrument and make it sound unrealistic, eternal sustain pedal on is one way to reveal that it's sample based. Pianoteq handles that a BIT better. Making MaxVoices=Unlimited on the GLOBAL panel works fine, and I'm unable to hear any issues at all with Bitwig5, VST3, Unlimited Voices, with normal playing.

Another source of crackling that is not a bug at all, is to send a lot of CC10 (pan) midi data into MSoundFactory. MSoundFactory will hard pan instantly when told to, and since one of my synths (a Yamaha DX7) likes to write random CC10 values all the time, it results in a crackling artifact that goes away when I disconnect my DX7 or when I add a bitwig filter device to block CC10.

if MSoundFactory were to execute pans slowly (over 10-100 DSP cycles) it would improve the audio experience for people who are automating or sending MIDI CC data into MSoundFactory.

I'm actually able to get nearly 40gb of MEMORY usage in bitwig's plugin container if I push hard enough on MSoundFactory. Again, not a bug. You want a 40 gb Piano? You got a 40 gb piano.

It might be nice to get a MeldwayLight patch from Melda that was tuned for 2-4 gb max memory usage. But we have the Monastery Grand and it's fine for those systems.

The magic here is in the big dataset. This has enough velocity levels and enough microphones, and such a high quality recording of such a nice piano. It's great.