Regarding panning, simply listen to some of your favorite recordings of piano to get a feeling for panning. One of my favorite piano recordings is Horowitz' return to Moscow. Not very much panning in that recording whatsoever. There's even lots of room noise and so forth. But the joy in his playing is evident.

Regarding 'what controls to grab for': Do you play piano? If not, it will be very difficult to verbally describe how to work the pedals.

In fact, Glen Kolot has posted here at least once in the past about how most piano software doesn't respond to continuous pedal information that his controller keyboard will actually output.

I believe the Pianoteq software does to that. Most of our controllers have a simple on/off switch for the sustain pedal. Glen's outputs at least 128 discrete values versus just the two on/off positions.

So, back to the original question: the best "FREE" plugin, in my opinion, is the sfz plugin with a couple of good piano soundfonts.

Mac replied that the Coyote has the Trachtman soundfont. Well Trachtman has several different soundfonts of various quality. It's possible the Coyote has an even better font than the one I pointed to several posts above. I kind of doubt it because of RAM issues, but if you have the Coyote plugin, you might be all set anyways. The Trachtman font I referred to has a 'mono' like quality due to where I believe he set his microphones when he recorded his samples.

You will find any of them to be vastly superior to the MDA piano plugin. I promise you that. It is worth the download time to give it a shot.

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