I agree that the piano tracks sound processed, but I don't have a good enough ear to say what's happening.

I suspect that they've been EQ'd with the high and low ends rolled off so they fit better in a mix. I wouldn't be surprised to find that WMA (a lossy compression algorithm) has something to do with it as well.

The other issue with the piano RealTracks is that they're polyphonic, and transitioning from one voicing to another means cutting off the prior clip. This works well for monophonic instruments and guitars, but not really that well with the piano. Notes that are "dropped" are much more obvious and unnatural. This is especially problematic if you add pushes, although I suspect that a number of these are just oversights in how they've been encoded.

I think this is the one place where offering Piano "RealTracks" as MIDI would give a superior product, because (despite what pianists may say) there are only a limited number of articulations available, and MIDI does a good job capturing them.

To make polyphonic RealTracks work smoothly, you'd have to come up with some way to make the transition seams less obvious. One way would be to make the crossfade longer, which means that each phrase either has to be held longer in performance, or edited in post via time stretching. This wouldn't work well where the overlapping harmonies were dissonant.

In any event, although the RealTrack pianos can be quite good, I think MIDI would give the superior product in the long run. If they were worried about quality, they could probably license an excellent VSTi piano to go along with it.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?