Kolozsvár Pipe Organ Samples

Key features

• The real pipe organ
  • the 1753 Hahn pipe organ of the St. Michael Church in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvar), Transylvania, Romania
  • 35 stops, 3 manuals (with 54 keys), the Rückpositve has 49 pipes and pedal (with 30 keys)
  • 3 tremulants (tremolos)
  • Equal tuning at (a=439.8 Hz)
• The recording
  • All stops were sampled chromatically
  • Advanced Pipe Organ Measurements (APM)
• The sample set
  • 48 kHz / 24-bit format, 2-channel stereo and 4-channel surround samples
  • Natural sound image — the samples contain all spatial information as they are heard
  • multiple loops and releases per sample
  • One-click assignable manuals
  • Extended number of couplers
  • Optional organ engine sounds and noises, volume sliders (in Professional Edition)
  • Adjustable acoustic perspective (in Professional Edition)
  • Multiple pages and touchscreen-optimized for 4:3 displays
• Shipping
  • download

Editions

Kolozsvar Pipe Organ Samples is published in two different editions: the Personal and Professional Edition. A freely downloadable Trial Edition, equivalent to the Personal Edition with a time restriction is is also available. For a more detailed comparison of the Editions, please click on the Editions icon above.

Details

Kolozsvar (KOL) Pipe Organ Samples is a fully playable, freely configurable, intuitively manageable and MIDI-controllable virtual pipe organ for the Hauptwerk™ virtual pipe organ software, on both PC and Macintosh computers, delivering the authentic sound of the 35-stop Hahn baroque pipe organ of the St. Michael Church, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to your computer.

The sample set

The real pipe organ has been entirely virtualized, including all sounds of all of its pipes, all functions including the original tracker sounds are provided with some additional couplers extending the original instrument for supporting even more convenient performance.

Sample format

The final sample set has been made available in 48 kHz / 24-bit 2-channel stereo (Personal Edition) and 4-channel surround format (Professional Edition). The Professional Edition can also be used in 2-channel stereo mode and the provided sliders allow you to change the acoustic perspective (mixing) between the channels. This is very practical for balancing the direct sound and reverberation in the samples you will hear. Multiple, lengthy loops were carefully selected for each sound sample. The applied surround recording technique supported authentically capturing the original spatial image of the sound. Some mixture pipes were virtually restored authentically using proprietary high complexity algorithms developed for this purpose.

Acoustics - multiple perspectives and adjustability

Due to the fact that this instrument has multiple facades, multiple recording locations were used to combine the sound of the sampling library. The stereo sound obtained from closer to the organ supports the "semi-dry" recording approach, meaning that it is perfectly applicable for professional installations both dry and reverberant places. The church acoustic perspective is more reverberant and captures the sound as perceived in the nave. By using the provided sliders on the graphical interface of the virtual pipe organ and mixing the two acoustic perspectives you can achieve a balance that fits your actual taste or purpose whether it is professional performance or practicing.

Multiple release samples and multiple loops

Multiple loops and release samples 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. 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.

Advanced Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The graphical interface of this organ was carefully modeled by employing hundreds of photographs and measurement in full 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. 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.

Availability and shipping

Kolozsvar Pipe Organ Samples is available in download delivery.

Editions

Kolozsvar Pipe Organ Samples is published in 2 different editions: the Personal and Professional Editions. The main difference between them is that the Professional Edition contains surround samples and adjustable acoustic features offering the possibility to virtually move your listening position further back to the church or closer to the organ. The table below shows a comparison of the different editions.

Feature type	Feature	Trial Edition	Personal Edition	Professional Edition
General features	Stops	35	35	35
	Keyboard compass (manual/pedal)	54/30	54/30	54/30
Acoustics	Multichannel format	stereo 2.0	stereo 2.0	surround 4.0
	Available acoustics	organist	organist	church, organist
	Adjustable microphone perspectives
	Combination memory for adjustable microphone perspectives
Samples	Chromatically sampled
	Multiple loops
	Multiple releases
	Tremulants	LFO	LFO	LFO
	Engine noise optional
	Touch sensitive tracker noise
	Intelligent repetitive tracker noise handling
Graphics	Single touch screen support
	Multiple touch screen support
	All functions MIDI & GUI controllable
On-screen combination actions	Remembering sliders
Advanced features and helpers	Single-click keyboard to division assignment
	Dynamic KeyboardMass™ feature
Voicing	Tracker noise volume sliders
Size	Download size (GB)	11.6	11.6	22.6
Delivery	Product delivery options	Download	Download	Download

Did you know? With the features equivalent to the Personal Edition, a time-limited Trial Edition is also available as a free download, just click on the Try icon above.

The free Trial Edition is equivalent to the Personal 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.

Highlighted features of the Personal and Professional Editions

• Intelligent Tracker noise
  • Details are very important so the Kolozsvar organ features, for the first time ever, an intelligent touch-sensitive tracker noise. The tracker noise is not only touch-sensive but for repetitive keystrikes different tracker sounds are played back. This well suites early baroque music and delivers more realism than ever.
• KeyboardMass™ functionality
  • The inertia of the mechanical tracker action is modeled, and adjustable, affecting the response speed of the pipe speech when a key is released and the pipe valve closes. You can make the keyboards feel very heavy by increasing the slider values, or extremely responsive by decreasing.
• Keyboard Assignment functionality
  • You may have different numbers of keyboards than what the real instrument offers, but with the keyboard assingment functionality you can map the keyboards of the instruments to your real console setup with the ease of a mouse click. There is no need to use use couplers as workarounds or complex configuration setups. Just a mouse click on the organs's virtual interface.
• Remembering sliders
  • As a convenience feature, all important sliders and function buttons in this organ will remember their last state when you re-load the instrument. Even the acoustic perspective sliders.

Additional features of the Professional Edition

In addition to the features of the Personal Edition, the Professional Edition contains the followings:

• Tracker and Engine noise volume control sliders
  • For each division a separate volume control slider is provided on a dedicated page of the graphical interface. This allows you to conveniently balance the additional noises.
• Surround samples and adjustable acoustic perpective
  • The Professional Edition contains two microphone perspective recordings for each pipe and for every noise sample as well. They can be either used as an adjustable acoustic perspective stereo by using the provided graphical sliders, or directly as front/rear for surround setups.

Upgrade options

Upgrading the Personal Edition to the Professional Edition is possible, to find out the details, please visit our shop.

The organ and the church

The first record about an organ comes from 1565, mentioning that ‘the place of the little organ should be plastered’, so this must have already been a fixed instrument. When the Catholics got back their church on March 30, 1716, there was nothing left but bare walls. There is a record about payment for an organ from 1728, but it was probably an old, used instrument, as in 31 July 1752 a new organ was commissioned. Organ builder Johannes Hahn finished the organ very quickly, shipped it to Cluj by February 1753 to start assembling it, and the 12-stop instrument was inaugurated on the 4th of October. The seven sculptures on the organ case were created by János Nachtigall and the paintings by master Katzler, completed in 1758. The organ had a double façade and was put in the front-middle section of the organ loft. While there was a note in the organ case about a ‘cleaning’ in 1775 by the resident organist, the instrument had to wait over a hundred years – until 1869 – for the next batch of professional repairs.

With the growth of the town and the proliferation of church music, more instruments were featured together with the organ and the artistic level of the celebrations was raised significantly. As the old instrument was heavily used – and used up – in liturgy, a new organ was ordered from István Kolonics, a master organ builder already famous for his excellent works throughout Transylvania. With 3 manuals and 33 stops, the new organ would have become the largest instrument Kolonics planned to manufacture. This organ was never built in the end. The Kolonics-organ would have required a lot of space, more than the medieval, high gallery allowed – but plans for building a new choir gallery were abandoned. Thus, the instrument built in 1753 avoided being reconfigured into a romantic-sounding one. Between September 2 and December 22, 1899, Gyula Csintalan and László Simon repaired the organ, extended its short octave without enlarging the wind chest, because Hahn originally built it with multiple compartments. The organ case was enlarged and moved to the back and an auxiliary console was built. From a historic point of view, these repairs were very fortunate, as – with the exception of two stops – nothing was changed in relation with the sounds of the nearly 150-year-old organ.

Again in 1926, plans for a new organ were commissioned, this time from Otto Rieger in Budapest. Five different – two 4-manual, two 3-manual and one 2-manual – plans were submitted, some of which were considered to be ‘a little too big’ by contemporary organ artist Rezső Zsizsmann. Pécs-based organ builder József Angster and Wegenstein from Temesvár (current Timișoara) also offered their services. The plan with 3 manuals and 48 stops was considered best but World War II – and the Socialist regime after – made it impossible to build.

When the professional restoration could be started in 1990, the instrument was already nearly 240 years old. The professional committee decided to restore the instrument in a faithful manner to the period but extended it with modern parts. Hermann Binder – the then only practicing organ builder in Romania – was commissioned with the task. The works were financed partly from selling the original Hahn-organ and greatly by the donation and collection of Magda Ottrubay of Lucern, Switzerland.
The new, 3-manual console, electric engine, flue pipes and other parts were manufactured by the Laukhuff organ factory of Weikersheim and 6 stops of reed pipes by Giesecke (Göttingen). The front pipes of the Brustwerk and a 2-row Cymbel 2 was built by György Jáky of Győr. In 1992 the 15th century church in the Saxon village of Vérd was left without a congregation, so its organ (also built by Hahn in 1768) was saved and transported to St. Michael’s. This organ was also restored by Hermann Binder. It was put on a movable platform and is used now during the liturgy as a choir organ.

The St. Michael’s Church in Cluj-Napoca houses a unique selection of baroque organs of great historic and artistic value. Unlike but a few places, here musical pieces written for two organs can be performed. Another interesting fact is that the short-octave manual of both the small organ and the Rückpositiv of the large organ are preserved beside the new console. The short-octave manual, used extensively in the days of J. S. Bach, is a challenge even for professional organists.

Specification of the Hahn organ at St. Michael, Kolozsvar

*The original organ has 4 couplers only, but in the virtual organ additional couplers were added for more flexibility. Historical couplers are accessible from the main organ console page on the user interface of the virtual organ.

System requirements and recommendations

It is intended (and required) that the Kolozsvar (KOL) Pipe Organ Samples be operated within Hauptwerk, a virtual pipe organ host software application (purchased separately). The Kolozsvar Pipe Organ Samples work with Hauptwerk V and later, and a valid license for Hauptwerk is required to load the organ.

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

Detailed RAM and polyphony guidelines

Hauptwerk loads all samples in the computer's RAM, with several loading options available according to your computer's specification. For wet and multi-channel sample sets, most of the RAM usage is due to the release samples, which is especially true for the Kolozsvar Pipe Organ Samples. We recommend using Hauptwerk's built-in lossless memory compression to reduce the loading size. Below we have summarised the RAM requirements with their corresponding quality options.

RAM requirements for the Kolozsvar organ
Edition	Loading setup	Bits	Loops	Acoustics	Releases	Required RAM	Computer RAM*
Professional Edition
	Full organ, 35 stops	24	all	cathedral, 4-channels	all	28.64 GB	36 GB
					single	20.64 GB	32 GB
					250 ms (all)	11.26 GB	16 GB
Recommended	Full organ, 35 stops	16	all	cathedral, 2-channels (front)	all	15.08 GB	24 GB
					single	11.00 GB	16 GB
For convolution reverb					250 ms (all)	6 28 GB	12 GB
Personal Edition, Trial Edition
	Full organ, 35 stops	24	all	cathedral, 2-channels	all	12.89 GB	16 GB
					single	8.37 GB	12 GB
					250 ms (all)	6.62 GB	12 GB
Recommended	Full organ, 35 stops	16	all	cathedral, 2-channels	all	6.93 GB	12 GB
					single	5.36 GB	12 GB
For convolution reverb					250 ms (all)	4.17 GB	8 GB

*The Required RAM column above is the memory requirement that also includes Hauptwerk*'s own memory consumption, so this is all the RAM the sample set and Hauptwerk* together will use, but some additional RAM may be required for the operating system itself, (not included). The measures were obtained on a Windows-based computer. The Computer RAM column shows a recommendation on the amount of RAM your computer should have as a minimum for a given loading setup assuming that some additional RAM is used by the operating system. This value might be different for each case so we recommend the maximum possible amount of RAM you could put in your computer for this sample set, except if you are working with external reverberation or in a dry acoustic environment. Also note that on the Mac you may require more RAM in the computer than the above indicated Computer RAM value, because of the operating system of the Mac. Also note that Windows is capable of loading more content than your available RAM, loading (paging) the additional sample data to your hard drive, reading 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 to access than the computer's RAM, but makes the full library usable in offline music composition and recording even if you do not have the required amount of RAM.

Licensing

Hauptwerk V platform

• Hauptwerk V license is required for the operation of the sample set
• No license update or activation procedure is needed to use this sample set

This sample set comes in an encrypted format compatible with Hauptwerk v5. Both the full and the Trial editions of the sample set require the presence of a Hauptwerk v5 evaluation, subscription or perpetual license.

Modifications and customization

If you are planning a custom or commercial application that requires a different setup what this sample set offers out-of-the-box, please contact us for making a customized version for you. 

Modification or disassembling the contents of this sample set through the CODM interface of Hauptwerk is not supported since the variety of functions and the availability of the sample set's certain special features already offers most of the functions the CODM interface may offer. The complexity of the Organ Definition File shipping with this sample set is uniquely high and building custom variants requires a certain amount of special expertise. Legally, the end-user license of this sample set is permitting using the samples as a whole, as they ship. 

Kolozsvár Professional Edition

Kolozsvár Personal Edition

Kolozsvár Upgrades to Professional Edition