Maschine or Akai MPC

[MBTC]

I use FL on the PC and Logic Pro on the Mac, so I'm currently researching how well it works with those DAWs. When I started looking into it, I figured coming from a software company like NI, the software integration would be ideal, but since I've already read at least one guy that said the FX applied to grooves on Maschine are lost when he drags them into Pro Tools (and the realtime FX were one of the things that appealed to me, so I may need to research that a bit more).

Also, I'm very interested in the Akai Max49 as an overall keyboard controller with Akai pads built in, and more importantly the little touch sliders. Just waiting for the reviews to come in to see how it fares (as far as I know it is not released for another month or so).

[Innovine]

I dislike all the issues and troubles (and indeed, the amazing flexibility and possibilities) that laptops bring, so I have a hardware-only studio with an MPC1000 running jjos 0S2xl. I find this limiting, but in a creative way. It's great to be able to curl up on the sofa with my headphones on and just poke away at the mpc. I don't think I'd ever get the same feel from a laptop and a controller, there's always wires and configurations and plugins and routing and moving a mouse around and clicking on things. That's not playing music in my mind.