Frank: thanks and feel free to take your sweet time with this stuff. This should all be about reducing stress, not causing it. We're all a little anxious to know how your progress goes just because it's exciting but noone here is in any hurry.

Some more info:

This month's Keyboard on p14 under their "rumors" section is hinting that Yamaha is about to buy another "European software powerhouse" which could "consolidate the market even further". They go on to hint that Yamaha is about to "get it's software act together in a very big way" and that laptop musicians made suddenly find themselves suffering from "option overload". None of this is said directly but it's all phrased in such a way that you get the idea.

You may recall that Yamaha bought Steinberg and thus acquired VST technology, but have as of yet to release any softsynths. Also, I noticed on the last page of Keyboard that there is an ad for CME keyboards which says "distributed exclusively in the US by Yamaha America" (the mLan capability of the CME's was a clue but this is the first confirmation I'd seen of the Yamaha/CME partnership).

So I'm hazarding a guess: Yamaha has bought somebody like Native Instruments or Zero-G and will announce a major set of softsynths to go with it's fleet of controllers and proprietary synth technology at Winter NAMM. I think this will have major implications for all of our "flr2006" systems.