AKAI Professional APC64 Ableton MIDI Controller with 8 Touch Strips, Step Sequencer, 64 RGB Velocity-Sensitive Pads, CV Gates, MIDI In & Out, USB-C

AKAI have done well with this. It is cheap and yet feels a fraction more robust than the previous model. The sliders are a touch more "smooth"The RGB pads are also great so you do not get "Lost" in the 64 pad matrix.I was thinking of knocking off a star or two for two reasons (but then I remembered that most people will buy this for working with Ableton).I did try it quickly with Ableton and it is a great budget midi controller with super portability.However, we use MIDI controllers for many purposes and so the documentation is important.We have 8 of the old APC pro mini and they have served well, mainly as midi controllers for our lighting suite for small to medium events.We have had three failures on the old controllers (all USB connector problems). We have resoldered in one which is holding up.It is now pretty difficult to find NEW Mk1s and so we looked at many midi controllers from £50 to £1000. For our purpose there was really only this one that ticked the boxes we needed. We needed to paginate the controller, to have at least 8 rotaries or sliders and be able to map main pages that are 6 by 5 with extra pad control available.For around £100 with a case, these are great value.When I unboxed this one, it feels and looks a tad better than its predecessor. Sadly it is also a little bigger and so we have to get more cases but that is small beer.I "assumed" which was very silly of me that this would be a simple plug and play with the same basic coding to the previous model and that we could get the RGB colours sorted afterwards.Sadly this is not the case. The documentation is not complete and so you have to guess at some of the coding and we will be making a quick youtube and making a spreadsheet of eh coding available shortly.The main 64 pad centre has the same note keys and the sliders are 100% compatible to the Mk1.The bottom and right side small pads have different notes and so we had to remap those before starting.The default brightness is the dimmest and very much TOO dim for a normally lit workplace. The colours are a prescribed list of 127 and there is documentation on the RGB codes for each value but no help on teh actual colours. Unless you are well versed in reading RGB hex codes then you might need a side list to indicate roughly what each code represents as a colour. We do read HEX and RGB but even then the documentation was painful to go back and forth.We are fortunate in that we can fully control our midi control stream and feedback to the mid controller and so almost 24 hours later we can see how to get this controller to light up on bighter settings, but for those using it as plug and play they might have a bit more difficulty or they might simply not know that actually the pads are much brighter.One other worry is the USB connector. They are of course a weak point for portable equipment but they have been more problematic on the old controllers. It looks like the actual connector on the new boards is the same. An old school USB 4 connector that does not quite go in all the way. We will wait and see if my fears are out of place and of course we will be taking extra care of that bit.Overall, this a a great piece of kit and we will buy another 8 to upgrade all our MK1s. If you are considering it as an entry into using a midi controller with Ableton or some of the DJ software then it is stunning and you should be using it within seconds of unboxing.If you need to customize the MIDI then look for our documentation supplement as AKAIs is woeful.If you are upgrading from MK1 to MK2 note that you WILL have to remap the outer pads and do something about the velocity and value settings.Have fun and make music, lighting or whatever.

Works well

Works as well as the Mk1, but with 100's of added assignable colours, which makes button identification so much easier

I had been doing research on best controllers for Ableton live 12 this controller gets somewhat mixed reviews but when compared to the Push 3. I am very new and just bought this to start learning ableton to learn and excited to get this. I think its the best value for money purchase ive ever made and hope to get really good at it so very grateful to Amazon for stocking the product at such a good price. Thank you. Always wanted to learning something like this from looking at handpans this really is me as I love electronic music

Buyer beware, if you’re buying an open box warehouse unit then it may well have been registered online already which basically means you can’t register it to your inmusic account and hence won’t have access to the bundled software that you need to get started, fortunately you can contact inmusic support to get the serial released but I’d already returned mine before they had gotten back to me..

Automatically configures itself in live. I have a good few controllers sitting gathering dust, but this one gets used daily as it is so damn convenient. Super simple control schema can be learnt in about 5-10minutes. Assignable Sliders are a big plus over the Novation and really like that it has a dedicated master volume slider. Shame it’s not velocity sensitive but at this price that would be a big ask. if I had the money, I’d have four of these for a 16x16 live grid.

There is something under the pads, they don't seem velocity sensitive or have aftertouch, feels pretty broken, confirmed with Akai that the hardware was faulty, I found it odd that when I received it, it seemed to look to have been opened before

Be warned, once you have registered this and are about to claim what looks like tons of free software, DON'T!! There's a reason that AIR software comes free with everything ever, it's garbage bloatware! Even the included plug-in manager here is just bloatware. It's ridiculously sluggish, and 95% of what it's there for is to fill your computer with adware and trials. Just register your APC64, check your firmware is up to date, claim your free copy of Ableton Lite, and just forget the rest. The only other worthy software here is the MPC DAW, but the included plug-in manager can't even manage to download that. You are better off claiming your free copy the normal way (MPC Beats is always free) while you are on the Akai website..