best piano soft synth

I'm looking to buy a new piano soft synth. Any suggestions on what sounds best?

It's perhaps worth noting that Dim Pro has two free expansion packs and, more recently, an expansion pack (Sound Factory, vol 1) that you have to pay for so there are plenty of pianos there to choose from. I also like the pianos that come with Garritan's Jazz & Big Band.

Good luck.

Laurence

Ivory.

I think this one sounds REALLY great (be sure and listen to the demos) and the price is right: Black Grand (even if the name sounds like something out of Monty Python's Holy Grail).

Electronic Musician picked Akoustik Piano as the best in their review of soft pianos (a year ago, though) - over Ivory. I'm sure Ivory is great, but Akoustik price dropped to $199 this year (NI seems to be getting more aggressive on pricing), so the difference in price is meaningful. Lots of pros seem to swear by Ivory, though.

If you're lucky, you'll have friends who have the various software packages so you can try them out. If you're like most, though, you'll just to have to weigh the reviews and jump for one, for better or for worse.

Too many choices for piano, and there are hot new contestants this year. I was quite impressed by the responsiveness of True Pianos (and it is one of the few that you can actually test, and for a meaningful period of time, too). I suddenly seemed to be a better pianist! I didn't buy, though, because my Yamaha P120 still sounds good enough, at least until I have fewer other important pieces of software and hardware to buy. (Let's see, in the last few months I paid over $300 for the Sonar upgrade with Dim Pro, my audio interface got flaky so I bought a MOTU Ultralite, my wife bought me the Digitech Jamman Looper - $299 for Christmas, I really need a second monitor, etc., etc.).

I haven't A-B'd any of the available soft-synth piano demos but I really like the design of PianoTeq. Unlike most plugin piano software, PianoTeq uses physical modelling algorithms instead of relying on gigabytes of samples. The install package is actually quite small. The demo sounds great and allows fairly extensive tweaking.

ORIGINAL: pooskie

I'm looking to buy a new piano soft synth. Any suggestions on what sounds best?

The most realistic sounding piano with the best playability IMHO is Ivory.
Nothing at the moment is even close.

The problem with Pianoteq and Truepiano is that as you play them louder, the dynamics get squashed sounding, like it's compressed or something.

Ivory takes a lot of space and is heavy on processing power though and if you are just going to sit a piano in a mix, one of the others will work fine.

For solo piano work, especially jazz, Ivory is the best IMHO.

That may change when Garritan releases it's Steinway software early next year.
I suspect Garritan will raise the bar, pun intended.

TruePianos is my favorite.

I have heard a lot of positive feedback about Pianoteq from ModArtt

thanks everyone. I checking them all out now.

Native Instruments Akoustik Piano 

Akoustik Piano sounds warm. But the velocity response is not so real. High velocity won't make the piano bang.

+1 for true peianos and Dim Pro. Though I didn't buy DIMension for the piano the samples are quite respectable.

I was using the free vst plugin from 4front until I got Dimension Pro for x-mas.

http://www.yohng.com/piano.html

A couple weeks ago I heard a buddy using Reason and some kind of Abbey Road refill. Sounds damn good.

ORIGINAL: Bren Gun

A couple weeks ago I heard a buddy using Reason and some kind of Abbey Road refill. Sounds damn good.

Thank you.