Well,

I was finally able to get B4 to work in conjunction with my Midi ports and play it through my Tyros. I had the midi cables reversed so after correcting that everything was okay.

Here's my take of NI's B4. Although most of the patches sounded good and some even very good I would still hesitate to lay down 200 bucks for it. One of the reasons is I was having trouble with the Keys on B4 "sticking" in the ON position while I continued to play the Keys on my Tyros. I had to stop my playing, look at the B4 interface to see the offending Key or Keys that were stuck in the ON position and then hit the offending key[s] to "un-stick" it/them.

Sometimes I would hit a key on my Tyros and no corresponding note would eminate from the B4. So every so often I was running into "dead" notes that wouldn't sound. But the real pain was the "stuck on" notes that essentially 'ruined' the song or piece I was playing.

One time I even got a pop up from Windows XP saying it had recovered from a serious error and the program (that was the offender) must close. Guess who the offending program was? Yup, B4.

I know you can adjust the latency of the program at which B4 responds, ie., the lag time, but no matter how I adjusted the latency I still had the hanging "ON" notes problem. PS: I also set the Aftertouch on my Tyros to different settings to see if it would help. It did help the 'dead note' problem some but it didn't eliminate it completely.

My computer is not the problem because my CPU is way above B4's system requirements and I got a Gig of superfast dual channel DDR memory, etc.

I do know the Midi specification is barely able to keep up with itself when transfering data from the computer to the Keyboard so possibly the Midi data transporting from the computer (by way of B4) to the Keyboard is the bottleneck and causing the glitches. That is my guess anyway.

Conclusion?? I'll pass on the B4 because playing live on stage is mission critical and if there is even a hint that a program could cause malfunction or glitches in a live situation (let alone in the quiet of your Home Studio) it ain't worth the bother.

My next step is to wait for CD-Soft.de to allow international online transactions by way of a CC and instant downloads of purchased Custom Voices over the internet. I've previewed all of the Drawbar Custom Voices on CD-Soft's web site and many of them are excellent.

If CD-Soft doesn't come through I will have to live with what I've got in regards to Organ Voices on my Tryos or possibly end up getting a Clavia Nord Electro 2 as a last resort. The Electro 2 is hands down the best hardware B3 clone I've heard as I've stated before.

Best regards,
Mike