Hi, I'm a new BB user (1 week), read this thread, and went over and bought a couple of ST expansion packs (could hardly lose, for $10 each). Thank you so much for starting this thread, I never would have known otherwise.

Now my question - I've done a ton of reading and trying and watching and asking, and have learned a lot about BB and ST and ST sounds. My question has to do with how to load my new expansion packs on to my machine so BB can use them.

It turns out SampleTank 2.5 itself is installed on my C drive, which doesn't have much space. BB is installed on my D drive, where I have lots of space for where I hope to put the roughly 4GB (zipped!) of ST expansion files.

I can see the default BB/ST instrument sounds in
c:\..x86\IK Multimedia\ST25\
Instruments\BB\
(Bass,Drums,...\Synth,World)\*.stip.

The instructions (clearly out of date) for the eSoundz ST expansion packs say to (1) drag the pack folder to copy it into (2) c:\..\ST2\STInstruments\*, and then relist the sounds in the ST app or sequencer (can you even see these sounds in BB)?

1. I don't want to unzip 4GB of zip files on to my C drive under any circumstances.

2. What is the win7x64 BB 2014 equivalent folder for the out-of-date "ST2\STInstruments" folder on my modern machine? I'm guessing it is "ST25\Instruments" as I found above?

3. I saw a video for the ST2.5 app GUI on how to load new instruments by using the ST Prefs.. menu/dialog to set the disk location to find instruments. It's not clear if this path is (1) just to load new sounds, or (b) if ALL (both old and new) sounds must be located below that folder.

I'm hoping that I can point the Prefs... path to a location of my choice on my D drive, and that ST2.5 will then index all the sounds there, and add them to it's internal list of instrument locations, so that I can access both the default BB/ST original sounds, plus my new ones.

Q. Do you think that's possible?

Q. How do I make the OmniSynth 2 sounds act like a different GM synth? Do I need to load the sounds, then manually bind (my choice) of sound to each one of the 127 GM midi sounds, then leave those bindings alone from then on? If I do that, and change the BB default synth to SampleTank, then my new OmniSynth sounds should be used whenever BB needs to use a GM MIDI patch, right?

Q. And if I use all the OmniSynth sounds in the 127 slots, there's no way for me to use one of the non-OmniSynth sounds (say an acoustic guitar) in a melody or solo MIDI track in a BB song, right?

I know that's a LOT of questions for one post, but I would really appreciate it if some expert could take a shot at them, and/or explain (why) there is a better way to do things, and what I should be doing as a newbie.

Thank you for your help. There's a HUGE amount of info to learn and to process with BB/ST/expansion packs, MIDIs, and importing MIDIs to melody/solo tracks, and binding them to better MIDI instruments than the default Windows sounds.