Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsAkai once again let me down
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2020
I never had luck with Akai products; got keyboards and controllers, and they never work as you expect them to work; which is a shame, considering that their devices if they only had a decent support on the software and firmware side, they could blow out of the water many other more expensive products.
The APC mini is fundamentally an ableton live controller, plain and simple. If you want to use it for anything else, forget about it, because it has no configurable controls, everything is fixed, and all the pads works as midi notes, so you can't assign CC commands to the side buttons for example.
As far as ableton live, it works but not as you expect. The pads do not turn on when you plug the controller; it takes few attempts before it finally start to show cells with clips in it, light up. Recording and moving through cells didn't work for me, everything was very approximate and not really that clear. The comparison with the Novation launchpad is like night and day.
I hoped the faders would come handy but they didn't; if you have already a fader controller, there is no use for those, because they are stuck assigned to control changes that can't be modified sadly.
In the end, if you use only Ableton, and you can make it to work, it may be useful to you; but if you are like me and use different software, DAW and VST; and need something you can use to drive your setup, forget about it
