Digital piano sound fonts
I have a Yamaha YDP-142 and the piano sounds great on it, but it only lets me download MIDI files that I have recorded, and I can't find any piano soundfonts that sound like the piano itself to play back on computer.
The biggest problem in the soundfonts I have found is that they don't effectively hold the sustain on the notes.
Is there any way to get the soundfonts off of the piano? Surely if they sell it as having a Record function it is reasonable to expect to be able to recreate the sound?
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I use Addictive Keys as in a DAW as an add on to play back my midi files and I like the sound better than the Yamaha. I got a free copy with 1 piano type enabled when I bought my USB interface. You can change loads of parameters such as the room dynamics to get a load of sounds.
In principle you could make your own soundfont, by recording single notes (preferably using a MIDI file to "play" the piano, so you get consistent note-on velocity etc) and using soundfont editor. But the results are unlikely to sound as good as the piano, because you will lose the interaction between sound of different notes played together. Good quality sampled pianos use huge sample sets - for example this one www.garritan.com/products/cfx-concert-grand-virtual-piano/, recorded from an acoustic Yamaha concert grand piano, has about 120Gb of samples (and even the "lite" version is about 20Gb).
Note, making a soundfont this way may not be legal - check what the user licence agreement for your Yamaha says about "reverse engineering."
A different computer simulation method creates a mathematical model of how the piano actually "works", rather than attempting to recording every possible sound it can make. Software like www.pianoteq.com/, which uses this "physical modelling" approach, needs much less memory and disk space than a sample library, but uses more CPU power to generate the audio in real time as you play. Any modern computer (including laptops) should be powerful enough to run it.
A good piano synthesizer (as in the engine of a digital piano) should do more than just play back samples such as panning the notes according to pitch and adding sympathetic resonance for strings not being directly played. A simple MIDI player with sound fonts is unlikely to get the dynamics working as well as a dedicated piano synthesizer. If possible set the computer to route the midi track to play back through your digital piano as mentioned in Topo Morto's comment. If your computer can't always be connected to your instrument you could try using a piano softsynth such as True Pianos or Pianoteq.
"Soundfonts" are pretty old technology! But there's a wide choice of "virtual pianos" that work on any reasonably modern computer. Here's one supplier:
synthogy.com/index.php/products/software-products/ivory-2-grand-pianos
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