Yes, I tried with SFZ, but still if you buy the professional version that is provided by Cakewalk now, it doesn't have the amazing capabilities for sound fonts that NNXT provides.

The best is not just mapping, and so on, but performance. It loads them really quick at startup (seconds). The difference with Kontakt load time is so much...

Also you can load as many soundfonts as you want, and you browse individual patches inside them quickly, assign them to 4 MIDI busses, create combinations between your samples, plus the sound fonts, route them thru effect units, equalizers, control them with virtual mixers... and control all of them from your MIDI controller.

I created one of my piano sounds in that way, starting from a Roland sound font, and I started to add reverb, compressor, adding some pads (coming from the reason presets), gruoping them in a combi, and controlling the brightness and amount of pad levels with my Axiom, it is really cool.

Before Reason , I also tested the simple SFZ, and although I worked ok for one sound font, the reality was that I needed more that one at the same time, plus a lot of control, that was not available from SFZ.

After spending a good amount of time with Hypersonic 2,0, Sampletank, SonykSynth, Kontakt and reason, i decided to stay with Reason, ans after 2 months doing thing in real time I am happy about it so far.

Pedro.