Kontakt? Gigastudio? Malmsjo? What?

You are right, sounds like Malmsjö will need a sampler. If you need a general purpose sampler, Kontakt 2, while not cheap, is pretty fabulous. It also includes a huge library, which has several grand pianos: http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=kontakt_us.
However, if all you ever wanted to do was to play one specific instrument,buying Kontakt is no doubt overkill.
I have to ask also, have you checked the pianos that are part of Dimension? Some nice keys there I think.
Don't be shy about asking questions here, people are nice in this forum!

I thought Gigastudio now ran as a plugin? Pretty sure the most recent version added this...

Anyway, the only other cheap alternative I can suggest is VSampler...not as nice an interface as the more expensive samplers, but if all you want to do is load up the instruments and play, then it should work fine. It imports both Giga and Kontakt formats (my own experience is that Kontakt import is pretty good and Giga import has seemed to work perfectly), so it may be worth checking this product out before dropping the bigger money on the other samplers...

I love Kontakt 2. It has some bugs, but it is working fine on my computer. The 15gb of content is worth the price of admission.

www.slip2004.com

ORIGINAL: samhoff

P5 does have a sampler, the DS864??? I don't use it since I have Kontakt, other folks that use it could speak to that.

Wait a minute. . . so I COULD run this piano with the sampler that comes with P5? Or not? I think maybe you're saying that I could but it would be unwieldy (?). Hopefully you can all see why I'm confused. Someone told me that there was a steep learning curve with this stuff; I'm beginning to experience it (I'm really just a piano player).

Sam

Well no, I didn't actually say that. You probably know that in order to make something like a sampled piano sound right, you have to have multiple samples spread over the lenght of the keyboard, and in many cases have more than one set of samples on a series of keys, for velocity sensitvity.
So you could , in theory anyway, take a ton of samples from whatever company, and hand map them in the P5 sampler, and make yourself a piano that way. By my god you probably don't want to torture yourself that way. Thing is, if you buy a multisampled piano (or whatever) set that is set up for a particular sampler, you can just load that into your sampler, all the tedious work has been done for you, right? Or with many samplers, they can load multi-samples that are in say Akai format, into their sample engines. Kontakt for instance can load just about anything, but you must remember that when you are loading samples into your sampler and the samples are from another format you may lose some features that are native to that format.
The short answer, I'm afraid, is no, you don't want to try this with the P5 sampler.
I would suggest, as far as sampling goes, that you google it and do a bit of reading. Its not that hard to understand, and I'm sure that you can get better explanations than I can cook up while I am goofing off at work. Also, if you are new to midi, do some reading up on that too, there is much to learn.
And don't get down on yourself if its seems hard to learn, I mean, its not anywhere near as difficult as learning a musical instrument, or learning to think musicially, if you see what I mean. And once you get an idea of what you can do with your new toys.......well......kiss your free time goodbye, you won't have any anymore!
dana

Thanks everyone.

One more question, then. Can I sit down at my keyboard, record a song in Cakewalk with the the VGP sounds, then use the midi editor to remove bum notes, and save it as a "perfect" recording? If I can't do this I'm not sure what good it is to have digital piano! (Confession time: I haven't actually received P5 yet; I suppose it will become apparent when I receive it if this is possible or not. But whether or not I can do this may affect if I purchase VGP.)

Thanks,

Sam