Released as part of Spitfire’s epic LABS project, which offers simple but hellishly well-sampled instruments, the Soft Piano plugin offers the character of a low-key, dampened piano. You can grab it at the Versilian Studios website.

This particular piano has been recorded with two wide, close mics, and offers Reverb, Panning and Volume controls, alongside Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release envelope settings. Despite the layers of sampling on show here, it won’t tax the hard drive as much as some virtual pianos, requiring about 250MB.

1 features three velocity layers and is sampled in round-robin, meaning there are multiple samples for the same note to reduce repetition. Recorded at the Berklee College of Music, and packaged into a lightweight package for Mac or PC and for the full version of Kontakt, this piano could well set the standard in realistic piano VST instruments. Every single one works cross-platform on both PC and Mac machines. There’s a diverse selection of both good and bad virtual ivories out there, but we’ve sorted through them to bring you the ultimate list of the very best free piano plugins in the world right now.

Whether you just want to pull up a simple sound that works straight from the patch, or you’re looking for a sophisticated recreation of a concert grand to bake into a complex production, there are a great many free piano VST and AU instruments out to meet your needs.

The Best 10 Free Piano VST Plugins for PC/Mac

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