These time limitations can be frustrating, e.g. On slow computers, sound reproduction "hickups" may still occur. On EastWest, there is some extra smart engineering to read in the data at the necessary speed - however much time that may take - and then to reproduce it in real time, as long as you have a fast computer. It can easily take a quarter hour to obtain just a few minutes of simulated musical performance with a complex orchestra.
On Garritan, simulation proceeds offline. There is a difference between Garritan and EastWest. One of the net consequences of this approach is that on consumer-level computers, real-time performance is often impossible when using these large data sets.
The EastWest data bases begin at around 11 Gb and can easily go up to 200 or more Gb for a full orchestral set. Since these sound chunks are recorded at very high-quality sampling frequencies, this approach creates huge data bases. From all these recordings, the sound engineer extracts sound chunks that can be chained together ("concatenated") to recreate new music in the appropriate contexts. This sound acquisition process has to be repeated at different playing speeds. This is the approach used in the well-known Garritan or EastWest systems. The most computer-intensive approach is to obtain recordings of all sounds played by a given instrument in various combinations, such as a G played in the context of a rising or falling second, third, fourth, etc. The Concatenation Approach (virtual orchestras) I'm simply writing as a person familiar with some of the complexities of instrument simulation and as an absolutely delighted user of these virtual instruments in my daily work.īefore diving into the comparisons, it is probably a good idea to explain three main approaches to the virtual simulation of musical instruments. I rush to say that I have absolutely no ties to any company mentioned here. In this contribution, I want to compare the simulation of a number of pre-piano instruments available in the Pianoteq, Garritan and EastWest offerings. One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the arrival of virtual instruments.