Kontact or Mach 5 or maybe Reason?

Which is best in the following catagories:- User interface? Stability? For teaching sampling and synthesis? Lowest CPU load? Cheers

Really have to disagree....I don't think an interface could get cleaner than Mach5, and it's been very stable on OSX for me. I never bomb. Downside is no disk streaming (yet). Kontakt: If they get their disk streaming together on the Mac....which has been funky as anything....it will be the one to beat. I hate it's ugly green interface (looks like a bad PC game ported over to the Mac) but all the really high end sample libraries are using it's engine. If you don't care about those huge libraries, Mach 5 is extremely friendly. If you do, KONTAKT is the way to go.

Informative review, Mark, thank you! I just remembered another benefit for Kontakt, is that it allows drag & drop sample placement, a real time saver. It also has loop sync capabilities, so your 110bpm can actually play nicely at 97bpm, without the need to slice and dice it, or process it offline, or thrown it in Ableton for that sole purpose, you can do it all in Kontakt. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss any soft-sampler, Mach5 looks impressive and I don't even have Kontakt yet (I've only see it used often by a friend), but it seems the latter has so many great features that give it that extra edge...

Thanks for the replies. Any more very welcome.

As far as teaching the nuts and bolts of sampling and synthesis, check out the Editor inside of the Unity Session demo. Although you can't save anything in the demo, it's as fully-functioned as you can get. "You can program the sh*t out of your sounds in the Editor." - Loyal Customer, Eric Mayron (LA's #1 ProTools Consultant)