I second Fratveno's Feature Request for a stepper. He's said it all for me also.

I've bought this superb library and ... well ... like Pyre admitted, tears have been involved for me too, as well as thrills, joy, inspiration and profound satisfaction. Thank you so very much, VSL.

I have a 61-note MIDI controller keyboard stacked closely above my main 88-note keyboard, and a 17-note Studiologic MP-117 pedal keyboard on the floor. These are enabling me to have tremendous fun with the the Great Rieger. I also have a Yamaha MFC10 MIDI foot controller board which includes a swell-type pedal, but I don't (yet) have enough clear floorspace to place it alongside the MP-117 so I might buy a separate MIDI swell pedal for now.

Also I've been trying out lots of multi-channel spatialisations, special Fx, etc, by routing the Organ Player's mix channels out to various aux channles in my DAW and - oh man - getting some really stunning results with my plugins. [Edit: When all factory audio fx are switched off there's no audible baked-in hall reverb at all!! So the Gt. Rieger library is infinitely accommodating for the user's own spatialisation setups ... and I am now seriously spellbound!]

I'm sure it must be illegal these days to have this much enjoyment, lolol.

Btw, I know it's very late (perhaps too late) to be suggesting this, but for a musical opener in one of your Great Rieger promo videos, VSL, can there be a better and more instant attention-grabber than the opening of this astounding piece by Max Reger (especially when played with the dramatic flourish of Roberto Marini, as here at the St Florian Basilika in Austria)?

I finally managed to get it downloaded. At last, this how an organ should be played!

The only real negative comment I have is about the GUI. I really appreciate that it's scalable, but even at larger sizes I'm still having problems with it. Grey-on-grey is a good choice when working in low-light conditions, but for the sake of others like me with eyesight that's not as good as it once was, PLEASE can we have a higher-contrast option? All it would take to significantly improve the usability for me would be for the stop names on the COMBINE page to be in white (or at least, a much brighter shade of grey) if not selected.

A few more small points:

• The octave and suboctave "couplers" aren't working as I would understand them. They seem to affect all manuals, but they should be per manual and the "unison off" feature should not need both the super- and sub-octave to be set. For example, if I play C4 on the Hauptwerk and have it coupled to the Positiv, I should be able to have suboctave, superoctave and/or unison off for the Positiv only so that I can get all possible combinations of C3, C4 and C5 sounding on the Positiv (C3, C4, C5, C3+C4, C4+C5, C3+C5 and C3+C4+C5), while still only having C4 sounding on the Hauptwerk.
• The tremulant has a good sound but perhaps it's a little fast for my liking, so would it be possible to add a speed option as well as depth? I just noticed that all tremulant parameters are available as CCs.
• I seem to be having problems understanding how the swell should work (or not work) across different manuals. OK, the answer to this one is on the MIX page rather than the PLAY page, where I can enable/disable the swell per manual and even assign two expression pedals to different manuals.
• This one is maybe not so small, unless (as is always possible) I'm failing to understand something. So, the combinations all seem to affect all manuals, which would be fine if the combinations weren't just turning each stop on or off. On pre-digital electrified actions, there would typically be banks of three-position switches to set up the combinations with each switch corresponding to a particular stop within a particular combination - up for on, down for off and centre to ignore, but there seems to be no equivalent to this. The way it seems to be now is fine for performance (and in a DAW where I can use multiple instances of the player), but not much good for live improvisation. For improvisation, by definition you don't set everything up in advance, rather you would have combinations that set various sound textures for each manual individually. I can't just open the combinations window and select combinations for each manual/pedals separately because, for example, setting a pedal combination clears all the manual stops.
• A late addition (or rather, a subtraction): Where did the Schwellwerk Septime 1 1/7 go??? I hope it wasn't dropped just because it wouldn't quite fit nicely in the GUI! (BTW, Paul Kopf states in the opening post that there are 116 stops, which is not correct as there were some stops apparently not in good enough condition when the original VI samples were recorded.)

All of that said, I'm immensely pleased that the Positiv Unda Maris D6 sample seems to be fixed now!

Intersting instrument for sure. I only don't understand why it's associated with Synchron Stage?

"The libraries labeled "SYNCHRON" were recorded at our own Synchron Stage Vienna and played by members of the Synchron Stage Orchestra."

"Libraries labeled "SYNCHRON-ized" contain re-edited samples from our VI Series that were re-edited and optimized for the Vienna Synchron Player."

"Great Rieger Organ. Legendary instrument at Vienna Konzerthaus"

Perhaps it's "SYNCHRON-ized" or any third option with all respect.

Got confirmation today that I get to keep the Konzerthaus Organ license with the offered crossgrade to Great Rieger Organ, so I will get it.

If it does not offer a way to turn on key velocity, then I'll probably not use it much, though.

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity, also for Konzerthaus Organ presets. But that took me quite some time to do.

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

That was a real help because I could set up what were effectively different combinations for different velocity zones. Maybe with the new combination facility it won't be needed, though.

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

Glad to be of help. Konzerthaus Organ was the first instrument I bought vom VSL, and soon after that Vienna Instruments Pro, even before I was sure that it can give me key velocity.

However, I had to make a custom preset containing each register and change it there, manually. I'd be happy if presets were XML or JSON so I could edit them as text and diff them.

@Angelus said:

The octave and suboctave "couplers" aren't working as I would understand them. They seem to affect all manuals, but they should be per manual and the "unison off" feature should not need both the super- and sub-octave to be set. 

Oops, yes, this is completely unusable...

Hi everybody, 

Thanks for all your input (no matter which wording you choose 😉). 

Of course we are already working on improvements for the next version of the Vienna Organ Player, so keep it coming!

Best,
Paul

@Paul said:

..so keep it coming!

As you wish 😇

The next thing I found was related to the sustain controller. OK, it's fair to ask why anyone should need sustain on an organ anyway. The reason is that I don't (yet!) have a pedalboard so I split my master keyboard 3 ways. The bottom octave and a bit is assigned to the Pedalwerk, which I have on MIDI channel 5. I also enabled the sustain pedal on that channel only so that I could at least play pedal points (Orgelpunkt). The problem I have is that all the manuals respond to the channel 5 sustain controller even though they are on different channels.

[Edit] Wondering if the new Organ Player is anywhere near to MPE functionality. If so it might help many users understand better and quicker what this Player will, won't, should and shouldn't do.

MPE is a valid subject, but perhaps that discussion would be better in a separate thread rather than discussing it here. I would rather concentrate on usability hits (and of course out-and-out bugs here).

And talking of which, given that I can't just use the player how I want to, I'm having to host several copies of it in my DAW (Cakewalk)...

So anyway, I finally have things exactly as I want them - I can have combinations that only affect the manuals I want (because each track is dedicated to one manual) and the sustain pedal only works on the Pedalwerk.

[Edit] Just looked into the Organ Player somewhat deeper and nope, it's nowhere near MPE functionality; it has its own ways and means, not all of which are immediately obvious or intuitive.

@Angelus said:

So anyway, I finally have things exactly as I want them

Well, no, not really because I realised I can't use the couplers in this setup without enabling stops in manuals other than the one that the player instance is dedicated to, and that then runs into the whole "combinations only set or clear stops" thing all over again. I was going to write a custom control surface for a Windows tablet that I have to handle the combinations for all the instances, so maybe I can put that between my keyboard and PC to handle the couplers as well. [EDIT] I now have limited coupler capability (so far: Hauptwerk to Pedal, Positiv to Pedal, Positiv to Hauptwerk, Schwellwerk to Hauptwerk and Schwellwerk to Positiv) via a small MIDI utility I wrote 😃

I found another very small issue, though, which is that there's some ugly "zipper noise" each time I stop the playback of a recording whilst a note is sounding. I don't get this on any of the other 50 or so VSTs that I have, including VI Pro. It happens even if all channel FX and IR reverb are disabled.

About the no-sound Positiv:

This is strange. As you can see from the standalone, if you have set channel 2 to Positiv, you should get sound from it, when you play a channel 2 note on message. However, there are several things that could be worth checking in your setup:

- If you are using multiple instances and you change your MIDI input settings in one of them, the other instances won't have those settings until you restart your host. We actually need to make that clearer in the settings.

- This is someting I ran into myself (In my case it was Logic Pro): When the MIDI channel you set up in your DAW is say channel 3 but you play your keyboard from channel 2, the host will only forward channel 3. So please double check if the player actually receives channel 2 messages. The way you could double check which chanel the player actually receives (I admit, it's clunky):

1. Set all your Werks to different channel inputs

2. Solo the track you have the Positiv on. Now enable/disable a stop on every Werk. The note you Werk you will hear corresponds to the MIDI input the player receives.

- The fact that the keyboard lights up isn't really surprising: It lights up no matter which note ons it gets... And when you play it it actually fires note ons for all channels

I hope this helps! If not, please contact our support in that regard.

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

Glad to be of help. Konzerthaus Organ was the first instrument I bought vom VSL, and soon after that Vienna Instruments Pro, even before I was sure that it can give me key velocity.

However, I had to make a custom preset containing each register and change it there, manually. I'd be happy if presets were XML or JSON so I could edit them as text and diff them.

I am not entirely sure but I think the Vienna Organ Player already features a way of achieving that.

Please watch the attached video for more info

@Another User said:

Please watch the attached video for more info

Ahh - so VO can effectively have up to 12 velocity zones!

"I am not entirely sure but I think the Vienna Organ Player already features a way of achieving that.

Please watch the attached video for more info"

I am so glad you included this!

I'm all for historical realism, but I am sure many organists and composers would have loved organs to be velocity-sensitive, so the ability to now add that with a computer interface is wonderful. I made a matrix to do the same with the VSL harpsichord :-)

@Pyre said:

I'm all for historical realism, but I am sure many organists and composers would have loved organs to be velocity-sensitive, so the ability to now add that with a computer interface is wonderful.

I like sounds and techniques to be authentic too but there comes a point where it would just be silly to ignore the capabilities we have now. I only have the one keyboard and so, for example, I use velocity-switching to effectively layer different manuals.

How would I record registration changes? That is, while I'm playing, I add/remove stops. Might those not be recorded midi messages so when I play back it duplicates EVERYTHING I did while playing?