Thanks for the info. One quick caveat before I start: I am biased against Apple as a company. I view Apple as a greedy company with not much ethics more so than many others. I try not to get into Apple products but after reading your post on Mainstage some months ago, I toyed with the idea of getting an Macbook Pro but dropped the idea in the end as I did not want to deal with two OSes. The next thing, I was given an Macbook Pro! Well, it was just a natural thing to shell out $30 to buy MS. I think that the $29 MS is Apple's bait to get people hooked on their expensive hardware.

No question that Apple is a better environment for auido/midi. I will use MS just because the hardware was given to me, but I have no plans to upgrade the hardware. So probably I won't really get deep into MS. Besides, I did test drove MS a little bit and I may be wrong but I don't think it would handle very well a controller like a midi accordion sending PC messages on multiple midi channels and changing multiple sounds smoothly all at once. I hear from MS users about the high CPU usage of MS, too. That won't be good when loading multiple VSTs. In the meantime, I stumbled upon Gig Performer. It is so powerful and yet easy to use. Low CPU usage. It allows me to use my VST instruments like hardware. Instant sound changes with a neat feature called patch persist make sound changes very smooth. I understand your Kronos has that feature, but very few other modules and keyboards today have that feature.

Once again, I appreciate your post and the wealth of info.