Alicia's Keys

I have been searching for some good sounding piano for along time and I'm still dissatisfied with TruePianos (which I own) and similar ones, because they have some weird phasing issues, which make it sound "far away", are not mono compatible etc. Eventhough I generally don't like Kontakt, after some audio demoes I decided to take my chances and bought this one.

1) Sound
I like it a lot, finally... It is recorded as it should be, so it sounds like you are very close to it, which is IMHO essential when mixing, especially modern jazz/electro/r'n'b stuff. And here's the thing - it is really only a soft jazzy piano. I love that, but I don't think you will want to use it for classic music or just have it is "piano for everything".

One thing I'm not sure about yet is the response - it just feels to me like it is playing "behind", on the other hand I'm often getting ahead, so this kind of fixes me :)).

2) Features
Basically there aren't any. Although Kontakt knows a lot, there isn't anything I found useful, except amounts of mechanical noise and stuff like that you will probably leave the way it is. But well, it's a piano, so what :).

3) Requirements
And here are the negative sides - it needs lots and lots of memory... Actually I have finally run out of 32-bit system memory. Kontakt shows it uses about 400 MB, but I measured something very different... Honestly I don't think a piano should need so much, but that's probably a price for a good sound.
But it's worse - it takes so much time to load, that I can literally grab a coffee everytime I reload a project :)... And if it runs out of memory it crashes...

4) Kontakt
As I said I don't like Kontakt - you cannot demo the library, it takes a lot of system resources, GUI is too complicated if you just need a piano, but well, it could be worse :).

Conclusion:
If you need a smooth jazzy piano, this one sounds great, but be prepared you will have to use a 64-bit OS (which IMHO is not an option on Mac, and won't be for a couple of years) and will need lots of system RAM ;).Read Review