Thanks Scott - it's been quite a while (got tangled up in photography - my other creative pursuit).

Allis: I agree with your assessments - it is a bit wimpy, but a fair bit better than my three year old Roland KR7 (which has a really nice keyboard feel, and models the damper pedal from zero to 127 in one step increments - something many digitals do not do). When I load a KR7 recorded midi into Pianoteq, it gets this part right. I have an EMU 1820M with Emulator X, and it's a disaster as it can't handle all the pedal control steps generated by the Roland.

And for the price and size of samples, I'm not ready for that.

A small footprint on my HDD is important as I have acquired 16,000 digital images in two years. Installed, Pianoteq takes 149 MB versus 138 MB for Powertracks 11. For HDD mercy, my favourite music software is my wave editor (Goldwave) that uses a whopping 8.81 MB.

I tried Pianoteq 2 1/2 years ago, and didn't care for it, but the present version seems a lot better - and I suspect with time it will be the way to go as it can be tailored to produce so many piano sounds.