Cliff: Colossus responds to your own program changes but not to GM midi file program changes. You can create your own program multi-patch setups and recall them but it takes too long for live use, as Frank said. And that's just to load the attack sample - the rest of the sound actually streams directly from disk. It can take up to a minute to load a multi-patch with all the sounds you normally need for a song. The goal is to find a quality GM-compatible softsynth that can respond quickly to program changes like hardware synths can... Bandstand has that potential even though it uses the same load-attack/stream-from-disk architecture as Colossus. We'll know for sure soon when Frank gets his copy of Bandstand.

Rikki: you and I are in the same situation... I'm primarily a pianist. I dislike the idea of having a controller that makes no sound of it's own but Frank is right - the piano sounds I get from Colossus are vastly superior to anything I've heard in any digital piano bar none. If the piano sound in Bandstand is comparable to the Steinway D in Colossus then it will be the centerpiece of my new all-softsynth live setup.

I don't own a copy of Key Rig yet but I intend to. I think it's cool and I can use it... I'll probably go ahead and order it today since Frank has volunteered to go out on the Bandstand limb for us. I honestly don't know if it'll respond to program changes from GM midi files quickly. It SHOULD. I think that a sequencer program is required to call up the program changes from Key Rig since I don't see a SMF player included. Unless someone who already knows can answer that, I'll volunteer to find out.

Edit: I found this additional market blurb from M-Audio about Key Rig:

"The GM-4 General MIDI Module delivers 128 GM instruments plus a great GM drum kit. It instantly plays GM-compatible standard MIDI files from host applications and provides an extremely easy way of sequencing additional backing tracks."

[This message has been edited by Esh (edited 11-09-2005).]