April 26, 2018

Synthogy, maker of Ivory concert grand piano sample player, has released an update that has been in the works since mid 2017, when I contacted development to report problems with the MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) tuning functions of Ivory. The sample player's MTS implementation had been broken at some point, and MTS Bulk tunings and single note tuning changes were not working.

Debugging MTS sysex support in an application can be a bit nightmarish, since the data sent is not humanly readable, but instead is a mass of encoded bytes. Without an interpreter defining the correct data to send in a human-readable way, if something is going wrong, there is too much decoding required to make sense out of the problem. To make the process easier, I gave Synthogy a free developers license for CSE, and I added new functions in CSE to send MTS Bulk Tuning Dump and Single Note Tuning Changes out to MIDI in real time, since those are the messages expected by Ivory.

Over many months of exchanging emails and testing intermediate beta versions, I'm very pleased to be able to say that Ivory not only works now as expected, but now has the best implementation of these two MTS messages possible. Ivory's tuning specification previously linked samples to fixed MIDI positions regardless of tuning, so that any tunings having unusual patterns or more or fewer than 12 notes per octave would result in tones which were strangely filtered, no longer sounding like a piano. For example, you can imagine that if you detune the string intended for middle C down two octaves, that it will not maintain its characteristic piano timbre. Instead, if you want a pitch two octaves below middle C to be available at middle C, then the string would need to be the one intended for that pitch, namely the string two octaves below middle C. Synthogy development got this immediately and agreed that samples for target pitches should match desired frequencies without losing the piano's natural timbre, so that MIDI note numbers should be decoupled from the samples when using MTS.

It has been a pleasure working with Synthogy development on these issues, and I warmly recommend Ivory. I'm not hired by them to say this and have no stake in their company or products. My recommendation is based solely on the quality of Ivory, and my very positive experience with their development and support. My honest opinion is that this is the best sampled piano available, for its brilliant realistic sound and excellent tuning features.

Download the update at: http://synthogy.com/index.php/support/updates/mac

Best Regards,
Aaron