Hauptwerk, the pipe organ simulator. Little bit about pipe organs and its use...So somewhere on this forum my specs are stated and people here where suprised by my amounth of ram and why I am whining about more. Well here is your answer: The pipe organ simulator. Mightiest instrument in the universe.
https://www.hauptwerk.com/Hauptwerk is an advanced computer organ system - a virtual pipe organ that takes full advantage of the enormous processing power of the latest computers to provide very complex pipe organ modeling and per-pipe sound shaping, while maintaining the enormous polyphony necessary to model a pipe organ successfully. At its core, Hauptwerk is a powerful and high-performance specialist software sampler, specifically designed and optimized for modeling pipe organs through the use of MIDI.
Hauptwerk may be used:
For study and practice at home by organists, organ enthusiasts and music students.
As a church organ, theatre organ, or concert hall organ where a real pipe organ may not be possible.
As a high quality sound module to power digital organs and voice expanders.
To upgrade old digital/electronic organs to the latest audio technology and realism.
In commercial and home recording studios to provide unparalleled pipe organ sound.
For music composition and arrangement.
For historical organ and music study and research.
For making a playable documentary of endangered or valuable pipe organs.
As an instrument on which to learn the organ in music schools, colleges, etc.
So what do you need to run hauptwerk?Well for a start your current computer will do. All else you need is a keyboard wether it is usb or midi.
Now we go into the hard core bits:
If you like what you get you want better sound, bigger organs and more. The program works by loading recorded wav files of every single pipe with multiple recordings off attacks (fast slow and others) into the ram. As soon as you hit a key the wav file is played of the stops that are assigned. This can be well over 8000 wav files at a time due to the reverb. So in order to load quick you will need a big SSD. Next crazy amounts of ram as the full organ is loaded into the ram. The better quality the samples the more ram you need. The bigger the organ the more ram you need.
So thats ram and storage. Next, to play the sounds you need a cpu that can handle the polyphony. This is a big bottle neck as this will limit the amount of wav files that can play at a certain time. This is why if you really want the best performance people put off anything possible in windows (onboard soundcard, antivirus, search funtion and whatever you dont use to get a lowest load on the cpu as possible) Having cpu spikes will mess up your sound with high pitched glitches.
At this moment the first organs are comming that need 2 xeons and nearing 200 gb of ram on 24 bit sound samples.
As you want high quality you will take an external sound card. If you care about latency you dont want a USB, Firewire or Thunderbolt one. PCIE goes directly into the cpu without any converters that create distortion so PCIE soundcards it is. I myself use a Motu 2408 mk3.
Next up is the console. I just work with a few keyboards and a pedalboard. Others use an existing organ via midi, others buy a custom tailored one, others make them themselves.
So the sky is the limmit while you can start underground.
To try it out you can download it for free using this link:
http://www.downloadhauptwerk.com/winIt is available for both mac and windows.
There is a lot of free organs and trial organs available. Even ones that use more than the basic version can handle. To unlock polyphony and ram used by the program you will need a dongle. This will also get rid of the irritating bell you hear now and then. If you want to try out the full version give me a heads up. The dongle is a Aladin HASP HL+ key that I am allowed to transmit to you over the internet. Offcource this is a lot of work and not an option to keep on doing multiple times.
Prices for the versions are as follows:
Advanced Editon $599.00
Basic Edition $249.00
Mind you that for this you only have the software. You still need to buy a pipe organ. The organs themselves can be bought from seperate vendors. These organs are so expensive because someone had to sit there in the cold recording pipe for pipe. This takes years. Literaly. Next to that maintaining a pipe organ costs a fortune so the organ owner who has to allow for recording usualy wants a piece of the cake. I dont envy being one of the vendors. Think of the risk of your organ not becoming popular...
In the next reply I will handle some examples of the organs in action.