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O.K. Here is my 2 cents worth: I love this piece of gear. I bought this after considering an Emu E5000 Ultra. Both were about the same price - $1,000,000 (or at least it semmed like it) I've always used Emu samplers, so I was hesitant at first about the OS. After 1 week with my A3000, I am completely comfortable with it. I actually prefer it. If you don't have the manual to follow, it semms frustrating. Take a hour an follow along with the manual and you'll realize how "intuitive" the layout is. I set up monitoring level, key range, effects sends, arm and sample in seconds. If you set the record section to New+, it will progressively map each new sample to the keyboard for you. It will auto-normalize for each sample (takes some time though). You can record through the effects (All 3). It can also be used as an independeant multieffect-unit, because the audio-input can be routed directly through the effect-section.
The effects kick ass - some are freakin weird, some are useless (scratch), but there are TONS to choose from.
The coolest thing is the way you can map stuff to the knobs by pushing them to select them.
3 things that realy blow (IMHO) - there are no alphabet/number buttons, so naming things is a needlessly horror of scrolling. At least they offer a paste command. Also - there is no visual of the samples waveform. Another thing is that when you switch out of some menues, your samples get muted for a fraction of a second.
Another thing to mention - importing some Akai sample disks screw up the loop start/stop points, also the mapping gets screwy. Almost useless actually, because most of the Akai disks I've tried add an extra piece of a bar to their samples!?! Making looping impossible without extensive work.
It is also hard to find quality Sample Cds for this unit. At the time of writing, Teklab isn't selling their A3000 series anymore :(
Ok, Ok, enough bad stuff - remeber Version 2.0 was a great upgrade, so lets see whats next.
Overall, I love it! If fells more like an instrument, totally expressive.
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