Akai APC 40 - The ultimate Ableton controller?

[jthompsn]

Damn thats nice *drool*

[BentoSan]

Nice piece of controllerism

We will be teaching people to do some cool stuff with the APC as soon as we can get our hands on a unit, that should be some good fun family fun for everyone

[DJ_Animus]

I really want one, considering what it can allow me to do, its pretty frackin affordable. Need to get better with ableton, but still using it as a second controller in TPro should still be sweet.

[deepstereo]

very cool! can't wait to get one. There is a countdown on akaipro.com

[tekki]

That's one cool vid shmobes!!

[Kotyara]

cant find price

[deepstereo]

it will cost $400 apparently

[Kotyara]

nice ting for good money. Cant wait to see it in work by my own eyes. Hope it`ll be possibl to by in Ukraine.

[BentoSan]

There was a Momome vs APC thread on that forum that it was fairly apparent that no one one knew what they were talking about there. I did a post in there that you guys would probably find interesting

The Monome actually sends its own proprietary data over serial and connects to a middle-ware application that then goes onto convert this data into Midi or OSC. OSC isn't supported by the APC which is kind of a let down because OSC is a far far better method of communication than the midi current is. That's not to say it shouldn't support midi either though because if it only supported OSC then it wouldn't be of much use in many programs because not as many programs support OSC as compared to midi.

To show off this difference lets consider a extreme example for a second - say that that you wanted to change every single light on the unit at once. I am pretty sure i remember reading somewhere that the APC-40 has somewhere around 350 lights. now, with the midi spec sending only 1000 messages only a second this will limit you changing 1 LED per every 1ms. In total it would take 350ms so it would take a third of a second from the first light on the unit changing to the last light on the unit to change. This is just one example of the problems that the midi specification has and why we need the HD midi spec yesterday not sometime in the random future. Admittedly 350ms might not be the exact number as i don't have the hardware to test with at this stage but what is important to understand is that this is just one of the big problems that the midi spec has

The problems that the industry is facing at the moment is summed up quite well in this article Ean Golden wrote in words that everyone can understand : http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/05/0...-the-end-pt-2/

So as far as the software goes the Monome wins when it comes to sheer performance.

[corporation]

I want one, but i'm not a big Live user.


Plus I'm not about to pony up the $450 needed for the full version of Live in order to get the most out of this APC40 unit. i hear it comes with a 'special' 8-track, 8-FX APC40 version of Live (heard from @Akai_Pro via twitter).

i'll stick with my monomes for the moment.