Pianoteq + mini-PC on stage

Looks ok...

Unless you are in Europe, use large mustache, and someone say loud:

"it's a bomb..."

Decent review here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6444/inte...g-hands-on

Definitely a nice piece of kit for the VPC1...

Thanks. So the kit consists of just the shell, the circuit board with the processor, and sound chips. and the USB busses and connections. When you say that you add the SSD drive yourself, do you mean that there is room inside and a separate bus, or does one connect an external drive via usb?

Any word on the pricing? Too high, and having to add the hard drive and RAM, etc will make it more expensive than a laptop.

It's really very compact...  now I see better.

Maybe some controller could have a compartment to fit it.

I'd consider building it into a the back of a damper/soft pedal unit to sit on the floor. USB in and audio out. Is it possible to control it from an iPhone?

Well, yes. I think the smallness of it appeals to me. It would be almost like having any vsti available in a module like the the old Roland JV1010. But without the controls, which means a screen would be needed, and so you're right. I guess we're left where we started, with basically a laptop.

I guess one side of me wants something similar to this, but with 10 knobs and an old, three-line led screen. But then I would complain that the screen was too small!

What I've sometimes thought would be ideal: An almost normal controller with a large sunken rectangular area in the middle where one could insert a laptop. A touchscreen laptop would work best. When the laptop's lid was closed, it would lie roughly flat with the upper surface of the keyboard. The keyboard would have a soundcard built in, or a cavity for holding the player's choice of an external soundcard-in-a-box.  The keyboard would also have at least 20 cc knobs or sliders for controlling the software.

Doesn't seem all that hard to create--really just a standard controller with a different shape.

I remember looking over the Open Lab things on their site. They were trying to provide an entire workstation along with their own operating system. They still offer a 37 key version, called the Miko LXD, and it looks good, but it's almost $5K US at Guitar Center. My thought is to just change the shape of a decent Fatar controller. If I had EvilDragon's graphic skills, I would create a drawing. The keyboard would just have a lowered middle section for the laptop, which the user would provide, and second lowered section, or a bay, for the sound card, which the user would also provide.

I know. Not an astonishing notion. Surely something has to give--stage pianos, by design I suppose, offer very limited control over the parameters, synths with a sampling ability or a decent piano have stayed at a high price, and the various vsti boxes are as expensive as a decent laptop.

My own "research" is, together with running Pianoteq of course, to replace my music stand with a rather big (touch) screen, connected to a laptop or mini-PC, just in front of me above the keyboard... But until now, despite the fact that I already did some performances this way, I'm not 100% happy: the definition of a paper sheet is still much greater than any screen, even "full HD" or better. When it's just a chords grid, OK, but when it's a Beethoven 's sonata, that's another story !
BTW, I already found two interesting devices: the USB switcher I wrote about (from the Scythe company), to "turn" the pages, and the freeware "PDF Xchange viewer", from Tracker Software,  that enables you to display the pdf files full screen, AND to annotate them in various ways!
http://www.tracker-software.com/product...nge-viewer
MUCH smaller than Adobe products, and very convenient!
If you prefer Adobe Acrobat, maybe you know that an older version of Adobe Acrobat Pro version (7.0, in CS2) is now free to download from their own site. No support and no warranty it will run on your system, but since it's free, you've nothing to loose! On all my PC's (XP/32 & Win7/64), it runs just fine...
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/

well you could tell the people: this is not a laptop, just a music stand ;-)