Here is the unit I use a lot, a little long in the tooth by today's standards, but has been rock solid here and has good driver support so far.

I just checked the M-Audio Support webpage and it reports drivers available for every Windows OS from XP to Win8, that's good. Also Supports drivers for a host of Mac OS's as well, future-proof.

Avoid a device that uses Windoze Plug 'n Play "no separate driver needed" or Class Compliant for this purpose. They can be trouble when trying to use more than one MIDI channel at a time.

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/keyboards...e#productDetail

Between you and me, I gave up on using Software sound solutions in the live environment. All it takes is a power bump to put you out of the show, waiting for a PC to reboot. And then you may find a bluescreen. I stick to Hardware MIDI solutions for the live work, and the difference in sound is not all that apparent then anyway. It is more important to me to be able to play the gig at all times. Using a keyboard that has its own internal piano sounds as backup, firing an offboard MIDI hardware solution that sounds better, such as the Ketron, always gives me an instant backup solution. Matter of fact, both the Audio out of the keyboard's sounds AND the Audio Out of the Ketron go to two different channels on my keyboard amp mixer, allowing me to just reach over and move two faders to bop from one sound to the other. Sometimes I bring up BOTH to get a layered mix without having to resort to fiddling with MIDI commands, as well. For example, the good old Yamaha C-1 Concert Grand Sample that is used in many Yamaha pianos and keyboards, when mixed with a slightly lowered volume from the Ketron SD2's Grand Piano, is a really full sound (once you get inside the Yamaha keyboard and reset the Touch curve appropriately, which in my case us usually DOWN from the default sensitivity to avoid the bang-bang that Yamaha's typically send...)



--Mac

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