Anyone excited to control their VSTs with Akai Advance?

[Maloderous]

I restate my thesis: I'm not interested in throwing more good money after bad. If we had an actual free market, maybe we wouldn't constantly be forced to dump all our tech every three years. There's zero reason other than greed and Wall Street for our current lack of long-standing standards and hardware devices. It's not "progress" that makes your latest gadget "expire" a year or so later. Notice how household appliances have been going the same direction...

Why do you hate innovation so?

[rod_zero]

I restate my thesis: I'm not interested in throwing more good money after bad. If we had an actual free market, maybe we wouldn't constantly be forced to dump all our tech every three years. There's zero reason other than greed and Wall Street for our current lack of long-standing standards and hardware devices. It's not "progress" that makes your latest gadget "expire" a year or so later. Notice how household appliances have been going the same direction...

It is not as black and white as you put it, there are many standards, MIDI for example, USB, etc. I do agree mobile devices and some computers are getting more obsolete (the Apple model).

PC desktop can last a lot of years, specially in the last years since CPU progress has slowed down since the launch of the Core i family. If you build a good PC desktop today it can last you at least 5 or 6 years, my 2010 i5 is still going strong and will probably go on for 3 or 4 more years.

Speaking of this "controller with software integration" market I will agree that it's a very risky investment for a few reasons:

- Hardware is tied to software so it depends a lot on the quality of the software and support.
- Keeping developing software is expensive
- OS updates, specially from Apple, break stuff and developers need to invest time and money in keeping their software up to date.
- Smaller companies can't sustain the R&D needed to support this kind of products.

I certainly don't trust Akai or Arturia, given their track record, I wouldn't get any controller from them.

Ableton seems more reliable, as well as NI which has showed commitment to Maschine after the Kore fiasco, but I don't think the controllers feel as good build quality wise as what you would expect for the prices.

At the end of all this the VIP software is simething that would need support and development, it's one more layer to deal with. So as long as this new flashy controllers depend on software that wasn't needed in the first place I don't really consider them as wise investments.

better drop the money on a system 1m and get a hw synth and a bunch of controls to map your soft synths.

[dune_rave]

This VIP is a more sophisticated solution than Komplete Kontrol but Komplete Kontrol works in a better way for the instruments I prefer (NI, Rob Papen, U-he). For example all the main Rob Papen plugs are NKS compatible. Just tried VIP, and I can make Blue II appear, but only with 2 presets (I think this really has >5000 presets).
In VIP I tried the 'import bank' functionality, but didn't really work.
Since we're talking about "universal preset managers" in case of VIP and Komplete Kontrol - the main question is : who will tag the huge amount of presets?
For example there are many synths that don't have tags in their presets, but they are popular such as sylenth1.
VIP shows Sylenth1 with ~1000 presets, Komplete Kontrol desn't show sylenth1 by default.
Both solution is incomplete.