I recently came across a nice pipe organ sample player for Hauptwerk-format and GrandOrgue sample sets that seems to be in a well advanced beta stage. It is called "Masterpiece". It is free and open source, and has versions for Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Android and iPad:
I have tried it with various demo versions of organ sample sets from different publishers, and it works well with most of them. It is quite impressive. Has anyone used this software with the full version of a sample set?
Yes, and it is still being worked on so should eventually play most if not all non-DRM HW sample sets. As for DRM, I wonder if eventually some way of playing these sample sets will be accommodated since that has more to do with iLok than HW.
But in the meantime we also have another option, OdfEdit which converts HW odfs to GrandOrgue odfs allowing HW sample sets to run on GO. It works well for many HW sample sets but some GO odfs generated by OdfEdit may still need a bit of tweaking since not all more recent HW sample set features are implemented in GO and can cause issues.
I tried a few Piotr Grabowski's sample sets with it and seems to work nicely, the choice of platforms is awesome as well, I might look into some linux distro and run Masterpiece exclusively on that. Two things I noticed when comparing to Hauptwerk: 1. Hauptwerk has some kind of compression going before loading everything into ram, I get about 30% les ram usage when using Hauptwerk compared to Masterpiece with identical settings. 2. the voicing is cumbersome and not as intuitive on Masterpiece as it is on Hauptwerk.
given that the software is free and still in early stages I'm very happy with it otherwise.
Lars: I use Linux Mint running on a mini computer with plenty of RAM. Linux Mint uses much fewer memory and CPU resources than Windows, allowing more room in memory to load the sample sets, and run them faster. But with some sample sets there can be an issue. Linux is case sensitive while Windows is not. There are sloppy organ definition files which will reference a sample whose file name has a different case, for instance, a reference to a file with a lower case "a#", while the actual sample set file is named with an upper case "A#", or vice versa. It can be a bit time consuming if there are many but the Linux version of Grand Orgue will flag the errors as file not found while loading, so one can cross check and change either the file name or the reference to correspond with each other.
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