I had to purchase a dongle, it was not included in the package, that cost $20 so it wasn't a big deal..

Yes you can make your own drum mappings, you can make your own kit of the samples you want, in the places you want. You can make velocity switched patches, you can do everything a sampler can do, just not import new samples, but you can make up patches using the vast library of included samples, just like a normal ROMpler.

You can use it inside a host, or stand-alone. I run it stand-alone for realtime work, since it gives me the best latency. As for using it with a soundblaster, I don't know how the ASIO drivers for those cards are, I'm using a Terratec Producer 22 card, and I get near zero latency. You need MIDI-Yoke from www.midiox.com or something simular to transfer the midi signals from OMB to HyperSonic, since OMB doesn't support rewire.

Doc-Z