The Keyboards Collection features acoustic Pianos in classical, jazz and pop styles, and alternative sounds like Honky-Tonk and Detuned. It also featured a best-of selection of famous “suitcase-style” electric pianos from the most respected manufacturers of these bygone instruments. A wealth of Clavinets, Electric Organs and Synth-based keyboard sounds complete the modern part of the collection. Featured traditional keyboard instruments include Church Organs, Accordion, Celesta, Vibraphone, Music box & Xylophone. Finally, an extensive Harpsichord section benefits from the new “Release Trigger” feature that allows realistic recreation of this difficult instrument. Synth sounds can be found on volume 5 of Plugsound.

Keyboard instruments may seem simple to reproduce in a library, but that’s only true when you let presets take hundreds of megabytes, and it doesn’t automatically make the sounds better. Most users don’t have that much RAM to devote to their sounds, or don’t want to wait endlessly for a sequence to load. Enter Plugsound: the sound design team worked really hard and went out of their way to ensure that all instruments use the amount of RAM they need, and no more. Why create a 200 MB Piano if you can achieve a better sound with 96 MB? In return, this extra work allowed the team to include more sounds in the 650 MB sample library, and make sure that this collection is as complete as it can ever be.

Features

The plug-in:

Identical in every volume of the series, the Plug-in is a sample-playback virtual instrument powered by the powerful UVI-Engine. Plugsound provides you with essential and useful synthesis tools: resonant filters, Amplitude and Filter envelopes (ADSR type); LFO, the most realistic mono-legato you’ve heard on a virtual synth, Reverb’ module...

The sound library:

Each volume comes with a “data file” full of multisampled presets that are easily accessed through the interface of the plug-in. There is enough space to offer the most in-depth exploration of a given instrument that a tone module has ever done. It evens beats most professional CDROM, limited by archaic formatting conventions which leave only 200-300 megabytes per disc… No mess on your hard drive, just those two files.

Plugsound formats:

Each Plugsound is available for Mac OS X (Audio Units, MAS, VST, RTAS), for Mac OS9 (VST, MAS, RTAS) and for Windows (XP recommended) based PC (VSTi, DXi, RTAS):

MachFive integration:

You can use Plugsound in a multitimbral plug-in, and enjoy dozens of exciting editing features: Three fully featured envelopes, a distortion module, new filter algorithms, syncable LFOs and dozens of great effects…

Integrating one of these instruments is easy: open MachFive and create a new empty soundbank. Now go to the corresponding folder on your hard disk and place an alias of your Plugsound’s “.dat file” in the soundbank folder you've created. That’s it! Rescan your MachFive Sounds Folder and you’re now ready to use your instrument directly in MachFive.

Each volume is supplied on a CDROM with printed manual and sound listings, plus multi-language PDF manuals & tutorials.

Purchase Information

Plugsound Vol.1 Keyboards Collection is available now at a suggested retail price of $99 for Mac OS X and Windows systems. Education Version is also available at a retail price of $59.

Requirements

- Windows 98/ME/2000/NT/XP - Pentium III 400MHz - 256 MB RAM - VST 2.0, Dxi, RTAS PC compliant host

- Mac OS 8-9/ OS X  - 400 Mhz PowerPC G3 - MAS, RTAS, Audio Units or VST 2.0 compliant host