Mini Review: checked out Ableton 8 Demo and Akai APC 40 in person last Thursday @ Dubspot… Ableton 8 Overdrive Effect is totally awesome (digital stompbox replacement) as is the new multi-band dynamics effects. Vocoder has potential, need to tinker with it in hand. The ability to configure what plug in parameters to control in track view is powerful too. Curves for crossfades, nice, but where is this control for the rest of automation parameters?

Straight up: Akai APC-40, I WILL purchase for the studio. What else, build quality of the APC-40 IS totally solid. I do see complications in taking it to a gig, given the footprint of it. There’s room for Akai/3rd parties to develop a proper gig bag to hold this device along with your laptop, sound card, hard drive, cables, etc…. I reckon someobody will do this at somepoint.

Max for Live won’t come out til much later in the year. According to Dennis DeSantis, there are still many ‘kinks’ to work through.