Using DP/Mach Five live

[musikmik]

(I posted this question on the Mach 5 forum as well, but a lot of my questions also have to do with DP, so...)

I am a musical director needing to figure out a way to use a soft sampler as part of my reduced orchestra pit on a national tour this fall. (After using keyboards and hard samplers for years, I would like to take advantage of the large sample libraries that have come out in recent years. For this project, I am especially needing great brass sounds, and would like to use the ProjectSAM Brass and True Strike percussion libraries.)
I need a sampler that can load various VST's and virtual instruments, be able to layer and map the sounds across a keyboard, and save these setups of these layers and maps and organize them so that I can advance through the list of presets during live performance. (I would likely be able to make setup last for an entire song, so the switch to the next setup would not need to be instant.) I am desgning the setup from scratch, so I don't have any limitations (except price, at some point!) My questions:

1. Is DP/Mach Five capable of the mapping and layering of sounds I am needing?

2. How quickly can you change between setups?

3. What computer setup and amount of memory would I need to run this type of setup?

4. If I am needing to sequence songs with these sounds, can that be done with DP being on the same computer as Mach 5 without bogging down the computer?

5. If this is not the right program for this type of live use, what would you recommend? How does Kontakt compare?

I am new to this whole area of soft-samplers, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[PSPartyband]

Machfive is a great sampler and I think it will work well for what you want to do. for each instance of machfive you can have it play 16 parts. but you will need a powerful computer to handle this. With my set up I can only play about 10 parts at a time. I bet I could get more though if I tweaked my set up a little. I think if you got the new Macbook pro you could get a lot of tracks going at once. Also you can save CPU by converting some of the VI tracks to audio tracks. in fact if you want to make it real simple and dependable, mix it all down to 1 stereo file

Also DP is probably the best DAW program for live performance. for 2 important reasons

1) chunks, you can set up one song file with every song in your show loaded in chunks so there is virtually no load time in between songs

2) V-Rack, you can set it up so all chunks (songs) use the sounds set up in your V-rack. so again load time is minimal

Anyway thats my 2 cents. Try to keep your setup as simple as you can. the simpler the better. In a live situation, you don't want anything to go wrong. I make my living playing live with backing tracks, and I hate surprises