Jamstix3 and BFD Eco

Received the BFD Eco yesterday and started to try it out. Great sounding drums - my plan is to get this to work with Jamstix3 (of which I only currently have the demo for testing the setup).
I got it to work rather painlessly with the Jamstix sending midi to BFD Eco (after fiddling around with the setup in ableton, jamstix and BFD), however these two plugins eat CPU resources. My CPU meter hovers around 50% with just these two as active.
I was at first concerned about the disk access and have considered upgrading my HD to a SSD, mainly because BFD uses disk streaming instead of loading samples into RAM, however I am not sure anymore that the HD is the bottleneck, it could be that they are just CPU intensive in their own right - and as long as I can still work without drop-outs and spikenoises I'll leave it for now.
I also tried adding some of my other RAM and CPU intensive plugins to test it out and it still hovers around 50-60% percent.
So far so good. :-)

Next step is purchasing a full Jamstix3, so I can use the setup with all instruments instead of just the BassDrum (which is a limitation in Midi-send of the demo of Jamstix)

Crashes with Ableton Live

I experienced a lot of crashes recently with Ableton Live when switching from arrangement to session view and back while trying to record and drag drop clips from session to arrangement.
I upgraded Ableton from 8.2.2 to 8.2.5 and the stability was hugely improved.

Updated content

I have updated the blog with a page describing my current software and another regarding my hardware.

Waiting for more instruments coming in the mail :-)

I will try to share my experiences with my setup:
Currently I am having problems with my external harddisk: It is not stable it disappears from win7 from time to time. I am now convinced that the problem stems from the fact that I have too many USB devices on my labtops USB port (currently 11 USB thingies!!) and that theinternal  USB power supply in the labtop is straining to supply enough juice. So I have ordered a new USB hub with its own power supply.
It is particularly annaying as the external disk drive is used for the samples for my larger software instruments.

Struggling with Behringer BCR2000

Today I tried to reactivate my old Behringer BCR2000 and edit the Midi setup of this fantastic Midi controller.
However the BC edit which is the only editor available from Behringer is still in low Beta (several years into its existence - I believe it was introduced back in 2004 or something like that). And I cannot transfer presets to the BCR2000 - I get an error "Timeout error "$rev R1" ...  which is an old known problem.
So trying to work around this I am using the BC Edit as an editor only and will now export the edited patches as syx files and try to send them to the BCR2000 using MidiOX instead.
I've downloaded the MidiOX program now and will try this strategy....
It actually works I can now edit the presets in BC Edit, export as syx files and send them to the BCR2000 using the MidiOX program - phew :-)