Frank: yeah, I knew from using Colossus myself about how much time it takes to load samples (not terribly long but not convenient for stage), and I knew about the Receptor package too. What Colossus actually does is load only the initial attack samples of the selected sound and then it streams the rest of the sound from the hard drive in real time, but even those attack transients take a lot of RAM and time to load. Colossus uses a modified NI Kontact engine as it's interface so there's a direct connection between Colossus and Bandstand. My gut feeling is that Bandstand likely is a baby-Colossus and uses the same Kontact-based attack transient/disk-streaming technology, but since Bandstand's soundbanks are a fraction of the size of Colossus then it should allow realtime program changes... in theory anyway.

I really didn't feel yet like investing in a Muse Receptor and Colossus is overkill for live use (excellent for studio use though - it has an unbelievably low noise floor and my recordings with it have been incredibly clean), so Bandstand looks like the perfect balance between sample size and loading time. I can't wait to try it... I just maxed out my laptop's RAM at 2 GB so we're both ready to go!