Having decided to let the uprade offer pass me by, I changed my mind and decided that, although I could see problems with the 64 bit plugin, the standalone should work.

IMK procedures are certainly better than I remember and the program download was accomplished speedily. I haven't yet started to download the sounds.

Users of SampleTank 2.5, who have ruined their eyesight squinting at minuscule text, will be delighted with the new main window in which you can read the names of instruments/multi easily in white on a black background. Many improvements have been made which I have yet to savour.

The actual setup for the standalone version is similar to all such programs excpt the options are reduced. ASIO drivers are recommended but you are offered one only, and in my case, the one was a corrupted driver left over from a previously uninstalled soundcard. Usually, a dropdown menu of ASIO options has been offered so that the above problem could be ignored. The DirectSound audio drivers were offered instead.

Next, the Midi Drivers were offered as "ANY" or selected from a dropdown list. I was suprised to see that the old faithful MIDIYOKE drivers were not listed. My Oxygen 49 Midi Controller and the Ketron SD2 were.

I found that, with minimal experimentation, that the Ketron did work passing the Midi data through to the ST3 and just required the Volumn slider to be set to Zero. No changes to settings in RealBand were required.

Instruments from previous SampleTank, Sonik Synth and Miroslav Philharmonik programs can be imported into SampleTank 3 being resampled by the engine. A "Lucky Dip" selection of imported instruments does seem to suggest that the new sampling engine has improved the existing sounds.

I was fortunate to be able to use the Ketron SB2 as the Midi Driver and I expect that any external synth should be able to achieve similar results. There is a need to locate a bridge like MIDIYOKE which will work. Again, some resolution to the 64 bit plugin in a 32bit program needs to be found.

Lyn