Recommend a USB MIDI controller for me?

[namnibor]

THAT is exactly why my dedicated DAW PC build is indeed *just* for efficiently doing audio and some video editing and with Reaper, I am guaranteed a few years at least in future of absolutely free upgrades and features that even to this day the so called industry standard, AVID Pro Tools users, still do not have the flexibility and even some cool features that an open source DAW in which the dedicated developers *actively and fervently* listen to their huge user base in order to implement or even improve/tweak things; at $60. for a non-commercial license, this pleases me because even on the Cockos Reaper Forum, you get support from people that do not have pretentious snarky attitudes. You would be surprised at how many Pro Tools users have switched and AVID being asses, they have gone out of their way to ensure that REWIRE is a mess if a Reaper user tries to integrate within AVID products to include the video editing products AVID owns.
I am not trying to "sell" Reaper to anyone but their philosophy is very much akin to how LINUX is to Microsoft/Apple, giving people freedom to say even remain working perfectly fine on a 3.0 version of Reaper while a 4.7 newest edition is out.
Consumerism and marketing irks the hell out of me and some people really are slaves to it to point on another forum someone was actually trying to tell me that I was a "dinosaur musician" for preferring hardware synths and I did not feed into the argument when they started down the path that the Virus is surpassed by software/vsti and how the Virus sounds "thin" and how effects are only way it sounds beyond thin! All I replied with is, "...and this is coming from someone that utilizes vsti's solely and has no issues oxymoronically stating/boasting about how they had plethora of vsti effects at their disposal for much better sound design than hardware?!!!"

As far as midi controllers go, Novation's announcement few days ago of new Automap upgrade ALSO added Automap to ALL their LEGACY controllers as well! That is very smart and progressive thinking. Am liking Novation/Focusrite more and more as I see a company that ALSO listens to their customers and has excellent customer support.
Early morning coffee rant over!!

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by namnibor

THAT is exactly why my dedicated DAW PC build is indeed *just* for efficiently doing audio and some video editing and with Reaper, I am guaranteed a few years at least in future of absolutely free upgrades and features that even to this day the so called industry standard, AVID Pro Tools users, still do not have the flexibility and even some cool features that an open source DAW in which the dedicated developers *actively and fervently* listen to their huge user base in order to implement or even improve/tweak things; at $60. for a non-commercial license, this pleases me because even on the Cockos Reaper Forum, you get support from people that do not have pretentious snarky attitudes. You would be surprised at how many Pro Tools users have switched and AVID being asses, they have gone out of their way to ensure that REWIRE is a mess if a Reaper user tries to integrate within AVID products to include the video editing products AVID owns.
I am not trying to "sell" Reaper to anyone but their philosophy is very much akin to how LINUX is to Microsoft/Apple, giving people freedom to say even remain working perfectly fine on a 3.0 version of Reaper while a 4.7 newest edition is out.
Consumerism and marketing irks the hell out of me and some people really are slaves to it to point on another forum someone was actually trying to tell me that I was a "dinosaur musician" for preferring hardware synths and I did not feed into the argument when they started down the path that the Virus is surpassed by software/vsti and how the Virus sounds "thin" and how effects are only way it sounds beyond thin! All I replied with is, "...and this is coming from someone that utilizes vsti's solely and has no issues oxymoronically stating/boasting about how they had plethora of vsti effects at their disposal for much better sound design than hardware?!!!"

As far as midi controllers go, Novation's announcement few days ago of new Automap upgrade ALSO added Automap to ALL their LEGACY controllers as well! That is very smart and progressive thinking. Am liking Novation/Focusrite more and more as I see a company that ALSO listens to their customers and has excellent customer support.
Early morning coffee rant over!!

If you like the idea of all future upgrades for free, you might try FLStudio, it is "purchase once and all upgrades free for life". Their revenue model depends soley on new signups and sales of new plugins... sometimes their plugin offerings are pretty good and they may get some more of your money that way But it is nice to get the primary DAW, all new features for free etc.

About Linux, there is no comparison to Windows/OSX there, and that's one reason it has almost zero marketshare as a desktop OS, why developing for it is a fragmented clusterfuck, and why nobody goes with Linux as a audio production environment.

About software vs. hardware sound.... in the very few attempts at somewhat scientific tests I've seen, where all things are equal and in a blind test, most people cannot tell whether a given sound is coming from a soft-synth or hardware. That's not to say it is the final word, in fact I'm surprised there have not been more properly conducted scientific studies around this. But one that I have heard universal agreement on, even from the hardware vendors themselves, is that by the time the sound ends up on the final mix, nobody, even the engineers at Moog, can tell the difference between the sound of hard vs. software synths. Does anyone here really listen to EDM and believe they can correctly identify when they are hearing a HW board or soft synth? If so I could recommend a show I recently saw on TV where these self-proclaimed vampires were looking for blood donors on Craigslist... they swore that drinking human blood energized them... lol

If anyone has links to scientific tests that show hardware can be conclusively distinguishable from software in a final mix, I would be glad to read them with an open mind. Just haven't seen them to date.