MainStage 4+

Here's what I'd rate vs what I pay:
1 star = >$100
2 star = $70-100
3 star = $50-70
4 star = $30-50
5 star = Free
Reason: Value for money. It's a really great software for what we're paying for. Considering what it can do. Unfortunately the cost is reliability. This is crashed on my during live concerts and that's a really bad thing. So, Apple, perhaps you knew this and that's why you only charge $30 for this. Anyway, 4 Star is all you get from me.

This program would be great if it was any tiny bit reliable. The newest edition is BUGGY AS ALL HELL and I’ve lost many hours of work because of it. After getting the spinning beachball of death while working on a set for an important show, I decided to rebuild it from a similar template only to have it crash the second I touch anything. The only support you’ll find are from other frustrated users trying to make things happen because Apple is useless. It would have been nice to use the synths I programmed in Logic, but since this is effectively useless to me now, I’m going to Ableton and building something similar. Get your crap together, Apple.

I’ve used this now for live performance in about 90 gigs and I love it. As a keyboard player, I use it as an enhancement to my Yamaha MOXF6. I run it on a tiny Air with 4GB RAM and have had no issues. While I use the MOXF for most of the sounds in my rig, Mainstage adds organ (B3 and the leslie), various ES2 and RetroSynth patches, EXS24 for custom samples (like the vocal bass part in Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk”, which I created in Logic using about 8 tracks of my vocals pitched down. I also have a 3rd party harmonica library and fiddle library which I use for country tunes, doing weird splits and left-right duplicate splits like Spectrasonics uses in Trillian). MainStage stores all my band’s 120+ song catalog, which I’ve arranged into genres instead of setlists, since we change up the song order during sets. Each performance I call up on MainStage sets up splits, patches, effects, and the sounds on my MOXF and the MX49 (which is also in the rig as a secondary manual and safety in case the MOXF fails). Mainstage allows me to play MX49 sounds on specific keys on the MOXF — and vice versa. My MOXF becomes a controller with various sounds across the manual: MOXF, MX49, EX24, ES2, B3, Retro Synth, etc.
I also use the sample player to trigger samples from the beginning of PInk Floyd’s “Money”, which I control from a hardware button on the MOXF, then fade out as our bass player comes in, using a hardware slider on the MOXF.
The power and flexibility is beyond that of any keyboard rig I’ve ever had. Splits are so easy to setup (whether velocity or positional). Having full song names is great. I use the notepad in Mainstage to provide lyric and key hints for my vocal stuff. Each song gets individual vocal part reminders. Doing weird quirky things to solve niggly performance problems is something MainStage does very well. I use the harmonizer/key trigger thingy to add notes to notes I play on tough parts that are really fast, or parts that go beyond the physical 49 key range of the MX49: Like the little horn fill on Video Killed the Radio Star.
And for $30 it’s insanely cheap.
Since I can also run Excel at the same time, I sometimes flip to Excel during performance for additional song information.

I could run a Montage (which is incredible in its own way), but the MOXF was a steal, the MX49 is crazy cheap for all the great sounds it has, the 2 Yamahas give my rig redundancy, the rig is light to carry, Mainstage has amazing sounds and flexibility via a huge colour screen (compared to a synth), and I can run other apps. I can even check the time to see if we should take a break.

I’ve even been known to mix Logic projects during our gig breaks, or in the hotel when we gig out-of-town.