Key features

• The organ
  • the 2006 Pécsi-Mühleisen pipe organ of the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, Palace of Arts - Budapest, Hungary; entirely virtualized
  • 92 stops, 5 manuals (with 61 keys) and pedal (with 32 keys)
  • 2 sweller pedals, 2 tremulants (tremolos), 61-stage programmable crescendo with different independent program slots
  • 2 consoles (electrical Stage and mechanical Upper)
  • Equal tuning at concert pitch (a=442 Hz)
  • a symphonic organ to perform any piece of the entire pipe organ and symphonic literature without any compromise
• The recording
  • High Definition Sampling (HDS) — all stops were sampled chromatically at 192 kHz / 24-bit
  • Advanced Pipe Organ Measurements (APM)
  • Synchronized Sampling Technology (SST)
• The sample set
  • 48 kHz / 24-bit format, 2-channel stereo samples
  • Natural sound image — the samples contain all spatial information as they are heard
  • 12-second notes sampled, multiple loops per sample
  • 2 independent swellboxes
  • 2 tremulants
  • Optional organ engine sounds and noises
  • 'Semi-dry' sample set with multiple release samples for providing natural concert hall reverberation and tracker action sound
    • Cathedral acoustics in Medium and Extended Editions also available out-of-the-box
  • Programmable crescendo wheel with enable/disable option
  • Ability to disable reeds, mixtures or couplers from all Crescendo wheel programs
  • Touchscreen-optimized for 4:3 displays of 1280x1024 native resolution
• The User Manual
  • contains a detailed guide to pipe organs, its mechanism and sound
  • provides you insight to the 2006 Pécsi-Mühleisen pipe organ
  • guides you to the Palace of Arts - Budapest and the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall
  • gives explanations of all stops of the organ
  • provides information on more than 80 different historical tunings (in Professional and Extended Editions)
  • contains a Guide to Room Acoustics focusing on pipe organs written exclusively for PAB Pipe Organ Samples (in Professional and Extended Editions)
  • and more
• Shipping
  • PAB Extended Edition ships on an external USB hard disk drive for an ultra-fast installation
  • PAB Professional and Medium Editions ship on Inspired Acoustics USB thumb drives (pen drives) for a faster and convenient installation

Editions

PAB Pipe Organ Samples is published in five different editions: the Small, Essential and Medium Edition, featuring a selection of stops and features, the Professional Edition with all stops, and the exclusive Extended Edition with special and unique features. A freely downloadable Trial Edition, equivalent to the Small Edition with a time restriction is is also available.

Licenses for professional use

PAB Pipe Organ Samples, besides for end-users, was specifically designed to be used by professionals and on-site installations. Separate and multiple licensing for Institutional, Classroom, Worship and Commercial use are also available. If you are interested in such use, please visit the dedicated commercial license page and do not hesitate to contact us.

Editions

PAB Pipe Organ Samples is published in five different editions: the Small, Essential and Medium Edition, featuring a selection of stops and features, the Professional Edition with all stops, and the exclusive Extended Edition with many unique and special features. The table below shows a comparison of the different editions.

Feature	Trial Edition	Small Edition	Essential Edition	Medium Edition	Professional Edition	Extended Edition
Stops	15	15	23	45	All 92	All 92
Chromatically sampled
Multiple loops
Multiple releases
Custom Combination Action
Combination slots/frames	30	30	50	60	100	1000
Programmable crescendo	1	1	1	1	2	4
All functions MIDI & GUI controllable
Single-page & multi-page touchscreen ready
Engine noise optional
Tremulants
Sostenuto
Pedal split
Swellbox direction selection
Programmable PL/TT
Pedal to manual couplers and splits
Concert Hall Acoustics
Cathedral Acoustics (sCSA)
Personal License	Free
Academic Discount for personal use (from 2009)
Institutional, Worship and Commercial License
Product customization service
Retail box price (personal license)	-	-	-	$499	$899	$1199
Download price (personal license)	Free	$129	$199	$399	$799	$999
Delivery	Download	Download	Download	Retail box / Download	Retail box / Download	Retail box / Download
Installation packages	2	3	3	6 + 6	9	9 + 9
Size (GB)	6	8	9	32	33	68
Available

*included with the license for the Professional Edition.

The Extended Edition originally ships with two types of acoustics, the sCSA cathedral acoustics and the original concert hall acoustics. Customized acoustics for the Extended Edition is available on request.

The Medium Edition contains an additional, free longer cathedral acoustics (CSA) reverberation in 6 downloadable installation packages accessible to registered users in addition to the shipping sCSA (a shorter reverb) and concert hall acoustics.

The free Trial Edition is equivalent to the Small Edition in all of its features except that the Trial Edition has a time-limited functionality of producing sound up to 15 minutes each time it is loaded, and disabling its sound output for a short time temporairly and occasionally within that period.

Improvisations features of the Extended Edition

• Sostenuto, independently switchable for all manuals and pedal; holds a note or a chord until you play the next
• Pedal Split with freely assignable split key; allows you playing two voices on the pedal with different stops by splitting the pedal into two virtual divisions, one using the pedal stops and one using the pedal couplers

Convenience features of the Extended Edition

• Swellbox pedal direction selector, which allows you selecting the operation direction of the pedals for the enclosed stops
• Programmable Tutti and Plenum, to program anything you wish to the foot pistons TT and PL with the custom combination action

Compatibility features of the Extended Edition

• Pedal-to-Manual couplers, to play the pedal stops on any manual with sounds coupled to the manual
• Pedal-to-Manual splits, to play the pedal on any manual with sounds split on the manual
• 100 MIDI-assignable direct combination selector shortcut buttons for providing even more compatibility with existing MIDI organ consoles

Product customization service for the Extended Edition

• In case you would like to have your Extended Edition with customized acoustics, we would be happy to provide you with a presonalized sample set following your requirements. For the details, please proceed to this page.

Upgrade options

Upgrading your current edition to the next is easy, flexible and cost effective. To find out the details, please visit our Webstore's Upgrade section.

Contents

PAB Professional and Extended Editions contain all stops and couplers of the 2006 Pécsi-Mühleisen organ. Its complete disposition (stoplist) is as follows:

Contents of the smaller editions

Apart of the stops below, all smaller editions features all couplers and their relevant couplers. The Small and Essential Editions are virtually 2-manual organs with pedal, while the Medium Edition is a 3-manual organ with pedal.

Details

Palace of Arts Budapest (PAB) Pipe Organ Samples is a fully playable, freely configurable, intuitively manageable and MIDI-controllable virtual pipe organ, delivering the authentic sound of the 92-stop Pécsi-Mühleisen pipe organ of the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall of the Palace of Arts, Budapest, Hungary, to your computer.

Designed for operation within Hauptwerk™ software, on both PC and Macintosh computers, Palace of Arts Budapest Pipe Organ Samples sets a new standard in virtual pipe organs used by leading organists, professional musicians, professors and tutors, educational, worship and culture institutions, recording professionals and enthusiasts.

The organ

The Hungarian symphonic concert hall organ of the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest is one of Europe's newest and most prestigious instruments. It was jointly built in 2006 by two companies, the Hungarian Pécsi Orgonaépítõ Manufaktúra, and the German Werkstätte für Orgelbau Mühleisen. The building process was monitored by a team of international concert organists and organ experts: Professor István Baróti, titular organist of Hungary's largest cathedral, leading the design of the instrument's disposition (sonic characteristics), with internationally acclaimed organist László Fassang and Mühleisen providing advisory roles.

.: Pictures from the gallery

Editions and versions

There are five different editions of this virtual pipe organ ranging from a small instrument to the deluxe limited-release exclusive edition.

Extended Edition and Professional Edition

The flagship Extended Edition of the PAB Pipe Organ Samples is designed to provide maximum flexibility. All 92 stops, sampled note-by-note chromatically are included and fully playable, along with unique features such as the graphical user-interface-controllable sequencer (combination action), the optional out-of-the box cathedral acoustics and advanced controls for improvisation such as the Sostenuto or the Pedal division (split). The Professional Edition also contains all 92 stops but ships with the original concert hall acoustics only and some of the advanced features are only available in the Extended Edition. A detaild comparison can be found at the Editions tab on this page. With the both of these editions you are free to explore the entire pipe organ literature, including solo and symphonic pieces, as well as improvisation, teaching and practice.

Small, Essential and Medium Editions

The Small, Essential and Medium Editions are smaller releases of the orginal pipe organ with a portion of stops professionally selected by leading organists. The Small Edition contains 15 stops allowing you to play organ pieces mainly of the baroque literature. It is a highly cost effective edition with minimum computer demand, it most likely runs smoothly even on your notebook compter. The Small Edition is recommended for anyone who is willing to play portions of a large symphonic organ without the investment in a performance computer. The Essential Edition contains 23 stops and allows you to play more pieces from the organ literature with a wider variety of stops. The Medium Edition contains 45 stops, almost the half of the full organ, and allows you to play romantic pieces as well but with only a moderate demand on computer power. The Medium Edition comes with optional out-of-the-box cathedral acoustics for the ultimate experience. All of these editions feature the same graphical interface as the Professional Edition, but with the convenience that the available stops are highlighted for easier operation.

Did you know? With the features equivalent to the Small Edition, a time-limited Trial Edition is also available as a free download at the Downloads page.

.: Pictures from the gallery

The sample set

The real pipe organ has been entirely virtualized, including all sounds of all of its pipes, all functions including the original combination action, its unique features and the versatile crescendo wheel, with programmable functions for subtraction of reeds, mixtures or coupler during real-time play. All virtualized functions are matched to Hauptwerk for easy control.

.: Pictures from the gallery

Sample format

The final sample set has been made available in 48 kHz / 24-bit 2-channel stereo format. Multiple, lengthy loops were carefully selected for each 12-second sample. The samples are in stereo, which means the image of the sound is preserved completely and accurately. This is very useful for those intending to create recordings, since the virtual instrument delivers the appropriate spatial sound image without need of any adjustment — no artificial panning or approximations were used in the creation of the library: what you hear is exactly the same as the reality. On the other hand it is also very easy to configure Hauptwerk to direct the sound output into a great number of loudspeakers, reducing the effects of loudspeaker intermodulation distortion.

Acoustics - the semi-dry advantage

Due to the fact that this instrument is located in a concert hall, the library is termed “semi-dry”, meaning that it is perfectly applicable for both dry and reverberant places. Unlike other sample sets where church acoustics is fixed to the sound, the samples in PAB ideally works together with any type of reverberation whether it is natural, such as a real installation in a reverberant space, or artificial such as a reverberation software, and it is you who can choose whether to perform or compose using the original concert hall acoustics or apply reverberation.

Acoustics - out-of-the-box cathedral reverberation

The Extended and Medium Editions of PAB are shipping with optionally selectable cathedral acoustics for playing convenience and instant cathedral organist experience. No further equipment or software is required, the provided 6-second tail release samples (holding samples with a reverberation time of about 4.5 seconds) comes out-of-the-box. The cathedral reverberation available in three independent release sample layers for each note and the reverb is made so that it spatially matches the original concert hall semi-dry pipe organ recording. Inspired Acoustics' proprietary CSA technique was used to allow this and the result corresponds to the impression what organists hear from the organ loft when playing: the clarity of the instrument is preserved while an impressive cathedral ambience accompanies the sound. The cathedral reverberation is achieved based on the measurement data of a real cathedral in Hungary so the cathedral reverberation is a natural sound, but it is completely noiseless in its full range of decay. You can read more about the process at the CSA page of the Inspired Acoustics Knowledge Base.

Acoustics - Multiple release samples

Multiple release samples provide realistic, note-off-triggered pre-recorded reverberation for different lengths of notes. For example, a short note, with sound not fully developed will produce a different reverberation than a long sustained note. This quality is preserved in the sample library by providing multiple release sample layers. Additionally, the Medium and the Extended Edition features out-of-the-box cathedral acoustics which were created by using Inspired Acoustics' proprietary CSA technique, also featuring independent release layers for different length of notes.

Multiple loops

Multiple loops are provided for each sample. Triggered by Hauptwerk to play back randomly, this elaborate looping results in sustained notes of unmatched realism. The loops were calculated in a well-planned way, yielding both shorter and longer loops for each sample. This provides the option for you of controlling the computer memory (RAM) consumption when loading the organ: by selecting only the first, shorter loops, you will be able to save a significant amount of RAM, thus permitting the loading of more samples (ranks). The short loops are constructed in such a way as does not impact the overall sound quality. 56% of the samples have three independent loops markers defined within them, 41% have two, while the remaining 3% have markers ranging from one to eight, according to the complexity of the notes.

Advanced Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The graphical interface of this organ is unique in many ways. First of all, the consoles were completely modelled in 3D and the interface was implemented in a non-orthographical, perspective console view that is fully photo-realistic and operational at the same time. The keys move while you play, and every button responds appropriately to your actions. The 1280 x 1024 native resolution of the interface is optimized for today's common touchscreens. Both multiple- and single-screen operation is possible: the large number of stops can be operated conveniently from a wide choice of interface pages displayable on multiple touchscreens. Alternatively, convenient single screen operation is also provided.

Unique and special functions

Touch-controlled Combination Action

In a revolutionary first, PAB Pipe Organ Samples offers a completely independent combination action that can be controlled directly from the graphical interface by touchscreen or conventional mouse control. This feature,not yet directly supported by Hauptwerk, was developed using an independent combination action logic, greatly increasing playing convenience while facilitating its use in educational or live situations. The saving and loading of combination frames is just as easy as with Hauptwerk's built-in combination action.

Programmable crescendo with multiple programs

The programmable crescendo is provided through a graphical extension that makes for convenient custom setting of the 61-stage crescendo wheel programs. The Professional Edition ships with two original crescendo programs, those programmed into the real instrument. You can change the choice of program in use by pushing a single button even while playing. You can enable and disable the crescendo wheel with a special stop located within the stop tabs, and it is possible to temporarily disable Reeds, Mixtures and even Couplers from any crescendo state at any time — again with a single click or touch.

Reeds enabler

The button named Zungen allows you to temporarily disable or re-enable all reed stops from any combination you are using. This is a very useful feature of large organs and can be used in many situations.

Optional engine sounds and mechanic noises

The organ engine in Palace of Arts Budapest Pipe Organ Samples is an optional noise source that you can enable or disable according to your preference. For recording engineers extreme-quality pipe organ recording is made possible since the noise is completely removed from the recording. For those who seek ultimate realism, you can turn on the organ engines, also enabling the sounds of the mechanical action when changing combinations.

Encryption and CODM

The sample set comes in a Hauptwerk-specific encrypted format. Modification or disassembling the organ contents through the CODM interface of Hauptwerk is not supported since the variety of functions, the large number of couplers and manuals and the availability of PAB's special built-in combination action already offers most of the functions the CODM interface may offer. The complexity of the Organ Definition File shipping with PAB is uniquely high and building custom variants requires a certain amount of special expertise. Legally, the end-user license of PAB is permitting using the samples as a whole, as they ship. If you are planning a custom or commercial application that requires a different setup what PAB offers now, please contact us for a customization.

Unveiled features

There are more unique and special features that will be unveiled soon.

The User Manual

The User Manual for PAB Pipe Organ Samples guides you through the fascinating history and details of the magnificent Pécsi-Mühleisen instrumental masterpiece, unveils features of the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, contains an explanation of stop names available on this organ, lists more than 80 different historical tunings, and provides you tips and hints on how to use best the library.

In yet another first, the User Manual introduces a Guide to Room Acoustics focusing on pipe organs written by Csaba Huszty exclusively for PAB Pipe Organ Samples in a comprehensive yet easily readable form.

The recording

High Definition Sampling (HDS)

Recording of this instrument was conducted following thorough acoustic measurements in the concert hall. All pipes were recorded with the same recording equipment, under the same acoustic and physical conditions, entirely at 192 kHz / 24-bit.

Advanced Pipe Organ Measurements (APM)

Inspired Acoustics' APM technology was developed to measure inner sound properties and characteristics of the pipe organ. APM is used to capture the sound characteristics of swellboxes, case behavior and actual equipment setup accurately.

Synchronized Sampling Technology (SST)

Real pipes behave differently in terms of sound buildup, and it is not possible to accurately determine the correct timing of the sample playback start-of-note without due care. Inspired Acoustics' SST is a technology developed to record an instrument so that note starts are sample accurate, meaning that both the sound buildup and the delay introduced by the distance of each pipes are flawlessly preserved.

Availability and shipping

Uniquely, instead of shipping on tens of DVD discs, retail box editions of PAB Pipe Organ Samples ship on more conveniently usable medium. The Extended Edition, due to its nearly 70 GB of size, ship on an external Hard Disk Drive while the Medium and Professional Editions ship on thumb drives (pen drives), allowing for smooth and convenient installation.

About the creation of PAB

Preparations for creating PAB included initiation and implementation of a broader cooperation between Entel/Inspired Acoustics and the Palace of Arts – Budapest. Being introduced to the instrument from the late phases of its building and voicing and following nearly 2 years of preparation, organization and planning the recording effort itself commenced in September 2007. On-site preparations included a custom acoustic setup of the hall, involving repositioning of the 40-ton stage canopy and 10-ton reverberation chamber doors along with all curtains to a location we specifically desired. All together a net amount of 640 GB of sample data was recorded with the exact same equipment and recording setup. Extensive post production started parallel with the recordings and the creation of the complete library, all together, has taken more than 12,000 working hours.

System requirements and recommendations

It is intended (and required) that the PAB data library be operated on host software called Hauptwerk. Hauptwerk can be purchased separately and is required for operating this virtual instrument.

For further information, please refer to Hauptwerk's detailed requirements on Hauptwerk's website.

Detailed RAM guidelines

Hauptwerk loads all its samles in the computer's RAM, and several loading options are available for you in Hauptwerk to set the sound quality affecting the RAM requirements according to your computer's specification. PAB was specifically designed and post processed in such a way that, despite its extraordinary size it will load successfully even on previous computers. We recommend using Hauptwerk's built-in lossless memory compression to reduce the loading size. Please find the summary of the RAM requirements with their corresponding quality options Hauptwerk offers for a selection below.

.: RAM requirements for PAB Extended Edition (cathedral acoustics)
	Loading setup	Losless memory compression enabled	Bits	Multiple Loops	Multiple Releases	Subjective Quality	Required RAM (3 layers)	Required RAM (2 layers)
	Full organ, 92 stops		16	all	all	almost maximum	17.3 GB	14.5 GB
Recommended	Full organ, 92 stops		16	first	all	nearly maximum	12.6 GB	9.9 GB
	Full organ, 92 stops		16	first	one layer	high	7.1 GB	7.1 GB

.: RAM requirements for PAB Professional Edition (concert hall acoustics)
	Loading setup	Losless memory compression enabled	Bits	Multiple Loops	Multiple Releases	Subjective Quality	Required RAM
	Full organ, 92 stops		24	all	all	maximum	24.1 GB
Recommended	Full organ, 92 stops		16	all	all	almost maximum	12.8 GB
Recommended	Full organ, 92 stops		16	first	all	nearly maximum	8.2 GB
	Full organ, 92 stops		16	first	one layer	high	5.6 GB
	Full organ, 92 stops		16	first	all, simulated dry (250 ms)	for applying reverberation	4.5 GB
	Manual 1: Great Organ		24	all	all	maximum	4.9 GB
			16			almost max.	2.8 GB
	Manual 2: Pos. expr.		24	all	all	maximum	6.4 GB
			16			almost max.	3.5 GB
	Manual 3: Réc. expr.		24	all	all	maximum	6.5 GB
			16			almost max.	3.6 GB
	Manual 4: Solo		24	all	all	maximum	4.3 GB
			16			almost max.	2.5 GB
	Manual 5: Chamade		24	all	all	maximum	1.4 GB
			16			almost max.	1.0 GB
	Pedal		24	all	all	maximum	3.4 GB
			16			almost max.	2.0 GB

.: RAM requirements for PAB smaller editions
	Loading setup	Losless memory compression enabled	Bits	Multiple Loops	Multiple Releases	Subjective Quality	Required RAM
	Small & Trial Editions, 15 stops		24	all	all	maximum	4.4 GB
Recommended	Small & Trial Editions, 15 stops		16	all	all	almost maximum	2.4 GB
	Essential Edition, 23 stops		24	all	all	maximum	6.4 GB
Recommended	Essential Edition, 23 stops		16	all	all	almost maximum	3.5 GB
	Medium Edition, 45 stops		24	all	all	maximum	12.3 GB
Recommended	Medium Edition, 45 stops		16	all	all	almost maximum	6.6 GB
Recommended	Medium Edition with CSA cathedral acoustics, 45 stops		16	first	all	almost maximum	6.9 GB

Please note: these are the requirements just for the organ itself to load but Hauptwerk's own memory consumption is also included in these figures. Some additional RAM (usually 1 to 2 GB depending on your hardware and software configuration) may be required for the operating system itself, and is not included.

Also note that Windows Vista is capable of loading more content than your available RAM: it will use all the RAM you have and it will load (page) the rest to your hard drive and read it once the sound is needed (played). In some cases this will cause glitches in the sound when played in realtime since the hard drive is slower than RAM, but this makes the full library usable in offline music composition and recording even if you do not have the required amount of RAM.

Computer upgrade information for experts

If you are about to upgrade your computer now and you wish to build a capable new PC, you may find it useful to know we have loaded the full organ (16-bit, all loops and releases) using an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 and 16 GB of DDR2 RAM running Windows Vista Business 64-bit. When you buy or assemble a new computer, please make sure that both your motherboard and your operating system support the amount of RAM you plan to use in your system. Motherboard makers provide the maximum amount of installable RAM on their websites, but note that common desktop motherboards have 4 RAM slots, requiring a 4 GB RAM module in each to reach 16 GB. Be aware that 4 GB of RAM is usually sold in two or four modules rather than one, but you will need it in one module in this case, if you intend to install the full 16 GB RAM. Once you have the RAM, please make sure you select the appropriate Operating System. You can check the maximum amount of RAM supported by different versions and editions of Microsoft Windows operating system here. If you are unsure about the details, please ask an expert.

For Mac users: please ask an authorized expert how your system can be upgraded.

If you are about to build a new computer for PAB and Hauptwerk, we recommend that you utilize the latest technology available. Regarding RAM we recommend using high-speed, low-latency modules. With 16 GB of RAM you can use and load PAB in a very good quality. Regarding CPU, we recommend either one of the latest 4-core processors (e.g. from the i7 series) or even better, 8 cores (either from the i7 series or from the Xeon series by using two discrete CPU's for example). Make sure that the CPU you select has a large amount of L2 Cache, this is very important to have a good performance. Today, even workstation computers can accept 16 GB or more RAM and there are motherboards that can take more than one CPU at a time. Newer motherboards usually offer 6 memory slots (older motherboards accept 4) so if you do not wish to have 16 GB of RAM, you can still add 12 GB of RAM using 2 GB DDR 3 modules quite cheaply in those newer motherboards.

More details and examples of working computer setups and recommendations can be found at the Inspired Acoustics Knowledge Base.

Demos

• Trial Version — A downloadable Trial Edition containing 15 stops is available for anyone equipped with any edition of Hauptwerk v3.11 or later to try. The free Trial Edition is equivalent to the Small Edition in all of its features except that the Trial Edition has a time-limited functionality of producing sound up to 15 minutes each time it is loaded, and disabling its sound output for a short time temporairly and occasionally within that period. Get it here >

• Sound and video demos — If you would like to listen to demos instead, please proceed to the expanding list of Demos >

Featured installations and notable users

Palace of Arts, Budapest, concert hall lobby - an Organ Simulator for all
	One of the most prestigious installation of a customized version of the Palace of Arts Budapest Pipe Organ Samples to date, Inspired Acoustics installed an Organ Simulator at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall's lobby, available twentyfour hours a day to the audience. The two-manual plus pedal equipped specially designed console, the touch screen interface and the rich multimedia software showcases the real organ interactively. More picture and information at the Organ Simulator page.
Conservatório de Música da Jobra - one of the largest professional Hauptwerk installations ever
	One of the largest Hauptwerk installations so far at a 200 seat modern auditorium in a music school in Portugal, Conservatório de Música da Jobra (CMJ) will be finished in February 2009. CMJ's organ console features 4 manuals and pedal, 76 lighed drawbar stops and a 120-step sequencer, and was made in the Netherlands by Content, under custom specifications. The virtual pipe organ to implement in CMJ’s auditorium will be the Palace of Arts Budapest Pipe Organ Samples. More information at the Inspired Acoustics Knowledge Base.

User reviews