Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

Well, you can certainly hold off getting one till the next OS release.  I don't
believe that it will be able to do sample burning without an additional sampler
to burn the cards with, but I won't know either for a few more weeks.  I
personally havenever had it crash on me, but I don't use it live so I wouldn't
be a good person to talk to about it.  I do know that there are plenty of people
on this list that do use it live with no problems.  The other thing you have to
keep in mind is that MOST gear out there can and will crash on you.  I've had
Roland, Alesis, Yamaha, Korg, Kurzweil and Akai bomb out on me at weird times.
A lot of times it's because I want it to do something it wasn't supposed to be
able to do.  Other times it's just because no-one had hit the limitations
before, but I'll tell you that Emu is exceptionally good at finding and fixing
any problems that pop up.  There were some bugs several OS versions ago that DID
crash fairly regularly, but the updates have made it nearly impossible.  That
doesn't mean it doesn't happen but seriously, under most uses it won't.
Basically all I am saying is that every piece of gear has limitations and you
have to work with the limitations but in the end you end up really making it
sound good.  If you are uncomfortable and don't want to spend the money you
don't have to get one, get a Roland MC909 or the Yamaha Motif.  But if you get
the base XL-7 off eBay you will end up spending $500 and then you can play with
it and decide whether you need to expand it or not.

In the end though, you shouldn't do anything that you won't be happy with.
*shrug*

Andre