Yeah fuck that, previewing is the most important part imho... also KORE looks like an expensive solution, plus it requires hardware, plus it just adds another layer of communication between you and the synths/samplers guts, which I'm not convinced would really be beneficial... they keep going on about a universal interface for everything, but how can you really say that, I mean the whole point of individual instruments is that they allow you to do different things in different ways, including the way you interface with them, that's WHY they're different... plus I'm quite confused as to how it could work with non-NI VSTs... I guess it just acts as a MIDI remapper for the VSTs its hosting, probably comes with presets for individual VSTs.. I don't know...
But in any case I'm working on a tiny app at the moment that should do the trick, just an easy app for auditioning and selecting samples, that's all.
Basically it just has a bunch of categories in a list on the left (eg. Kicks, Snares etc.) and for each category you specify filename search terms (eg. "bd", "bassdrum", "kick" etc.), plus a set of working directories (Eg. "C:\Music\Samples, D:\Samples") and then when you click on a category on the left, it fills the main panel up with all of the samples, then you can simply let it play through all of them in a row, with the ability to stop/start the playing, mark individual samples as favourites, or simply roll your mouse over the list and hear the samples under the mouse play instantly. There'll also be a "Favourites Only" filter which limits the lists to the marked as favourite samples. If you double click a sample it'll bring up an explorer window with the file selected. How's that sound? Any other features you'd want? That was all I could think of...
It should be ready some time next week I reckon for people to try out.

I'll post it in this thread...
One question that would help me out:
How many samples do people have? Like if you go to your samples directory, right click and choose Properties, how many files come up? I've got about 14000, just wondering what size databases I should be expecting... at the moment I've got a limit of 32768 samples because I'm a hack programmer

, but I could increase that.