Dave and Nick, thank you both for such on-the-money (and understandable) explanations. Now I get it. I know that Kontakt hangs on to unused samples, but it does have its own 'purge' capability which dumps every sample NOT used in a given MIDI track (or universally). It's something one has to remember to do, but a great feature (not unlike the equivalent in Vienna Instruments, I believe. But this standalone/Soundflower idea is VERY interesting. I was in composer John Frizzel's studio recently and he'd ditched his two Gigastudio rigs in favor of a second G5 (for reasons that I won't drag up here) and was using a couple of free utilities to do much the same thing — with standalone instances of pre-v2 Kontakt running on the second machine. It was too much for me to absorb at the time, but now I'm ready for it :-) I've just done a search for Soundflower and see on the related forums that 'Jack' has just been released (formerly only Linux-based) and that it does much the same thing (some are saying better), so there's something else to look at. BFD *does* have a standalone version, but only in its stereo-only garb — no multiple outs — which is a shame. That said, to run Kontakt through Soundflower would free the RAM situation up so much that BFD would be less of an issue. I'm strongly considering getting this new Muse Research Receptor Pro as my BFD workhorse anyway. I've been talking with the grande fromage at Muse about it's capabilities in this regard, and here's what he emailed just yesterday: "...I loaded the JNF Big Gretsch Brush Set, the Gretsch Maple Kit, and the WFL 1958 Brush Kit from XFL, all at once on a Receptor Pro. You do have to set the RAM cache and disk streaming settings on BFD properly, I've got it set to 8192 and16384, if I trigger them all at once (all 3 kits, so I am playing 3 snares from 3 different BFDs every time I hit the snare, all on MIDI channel 1) for a layered sound the hard drive gives out, but that is probably not what you are doing, you probably just want them all ready to go so you don't have any load time, and will be playing individual hits fom each kit...so this setup plays with no glitches and will work perfectly for your needs. By the way, at this setting, Receptor says I still have 42% of memory available...and I have the buffer latency set to 256 samples." Allegedly, (word on the street) many of the revisions that have been made to BFD that have turned it from a buggy liability into a stable workhorse have come through FXPansion's close working with Muse Research... All good stuff. Thanks again for your wisdom. I'm going to report back when I get everything working and look forward to the article in your un-missable mag! Trevor