FFT-polyphonic pitch tracking and 256 list-limits

Dear Maxers,

I'm trying (perhaps in vein) to track pitches, or rather contours on a grand piano. I'm hoping to get an estimate, within a minor third or so of the highest pitch in any given chord or arpeggio independent of dynamics. I've tried fiddle~, pitch~, and sigmund~ without much success. I've also used the jit.poke~-spectrogram.pat. To get any kind of accuracy in the bass, where 28Hz covers the an entire lower, octave I'm using an FFT size of 4096 samples. However I can't really get at all the data generated. [jit.spill] seems to be limited to a list-length of 256. I tried using two of them with an offset and then combining them, but [zl join] also seems to have a 256 length limit, and [capture] doesn't have any outlets (I wish the spectrograph object let you at the FFT data it uses). So my questions (so far) are

-How get at all the FFT data coming out of the fft~/cartopol~ objects to other than using [jit.poke~] and [jit.spill]?
-How to form lists with more than 256 elements?
-Any tips for polyphonic pitch/contour estimation?

Thanks for any ideas,

Christopher