Reviews of Receptor in live situations?

[musikmik]

Hey, everyone! I am new to the forum and am a musical director for musical theater. Half of my sample work is sequencing in the studio and half is in live usage in orchestra pits. This fall I am going on a national tour of a musical and am needing to supplement my pit with samples (primarily orchestral/jazz/Broadway in nature). In the past I have used my Kurzweil 2600's to load samples into and layer sounds to meet my needs. With the tour I will travelling on a daily basis, so I need something rugged enough to take the abuse. The Kurzweils have always proved easy and reliable, but like hardware samplers, my memory is severly limited so the sounds are often a big compromise compared to what I would like to hear.
I've read a ton of information on Receptor, but I haven't run into many reviews of how it works in a live setting. How reliable is it? Does it crash or freeze often? In many of my shows I will need up to 200-300 setups of various sounds layered and mapped in different configurations which I can cycle through to cover what I need. Is changing sound setups risky for crashing Receptor? If I am able to load all of the sounds I need for a gig into the RAM at once, does that eliminate a lot of the risk of crashing? And if there is a crash, how long does it take to startup again?
I'm posting several places in the forum, as after years of suffering through limited samples I am looking at upgrading my sample library and computer system. Receptor is one option; KORE looks very interesting as well. If you have any ideas other than Receptor for what it sounds like I need, please let me know! Thanks!

Michael B

[Briggity]

We are now using Receptor the bulk of the keyboard sounds on the Tom Jones tour. Ivory, B4, FM7, Pro-53, Absynth 3, MiniMonsta, Kompakt are all running concurrently. Switching soft-synth presets is instantaneous with Z-Load enabled; switching sampled instruments can take longer. Depending on how much sample memory you need to load all the sounds for your show, you might be able to load everything in memory and just use mixer snapshots to switch sounds. Getting up to speed on how Receptor handles program changes, etc. took us some time, but now that the show is programmed it's a real workhorse and has not let us down once in about 40 shows since we made the switch. It has reset a couple of times in programming sessions when we sent a wrong multi patch change or some other MIDI garbage to it....but it was back online in about 15 seconds. The only other keyboard sounds in the show are coming from the Kurzweil PC2x controller keyboard (mostly Rhodes/Wurly/Clav), and one string sound which still lives on the Kurzweil K2500R.


Brian

[coldmachine]

Receptor has functioned flawlessly for us Live. For genuine critical situations, rather than bedroom fanboy use, Kore is too new at the moment. Im sure it will be exellent (Ive ordered one). It should be well sorted before your tour but either way make your decision well before the tour. Depending on where you are in the industry you should be able to get someone like GC Pro to come out to you and demo then leave the stuff on aproval, always the way to go.