So, you’ve been looking at that Akai APC40. And it’s
appealing. It’s got lots of lights and a huge array of buttons
for triggering samples or video or what have you, and plenty of knobs
and faders.
Now the APC40 has some serious “indie” competition, though, in the form of Livid’s Ohm64. Let’s compare:
APC40:
- Proprietary connection to Ableton Live
- A proprietary handshake that ensures only a real APC is being used with Live
- Fixed MIDI assignments – no MIDI assignment editor
- MIDI only
- No MIDI out jacks, so you can’t use it with outboard gear
- No bus power
- 40 buttons
- Made in some factory somewhere we’ve never seen
Livid Ohm64:
- Open source editor, partially open source firmware, open source patches to connect to whatever you want
- Custom MIDI assignments, for use with whatever you want
- MIDI for now, but the chipset supports open source solutions for
OpenSoundControl (OSC) in the near future – and even DMX (for
lighting) is a possibility - USB and standard MIDI jacks so you can sequence outboard gear
- Bus power
- 64 trigger buttons in a more logical 8×8 array
- “Made in the USA by humans” – with a beautifully-crafted body
- Free Cell DNA video software included
Both the APC and Ohm are class-compliant, so at least neither needs
drivers to work over USB for MIDI on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Sure, the APC is plug-and-play with Live. But just as lots of
non-programmers use open source browsers like Firefox, the whole point
is that the Ohm could wind up being more plug and play with more tools
thanks to its more open approach.
Via : Createdigitalmusic
