this thing is easy to use, right out of the box.... load one of the factory presets & it brings with it a load of samples, sequences & even a song structure. getting your head round the architecture is a breeze, even with convoluted workflows. the "keys" screen is useable, bit smaller than most you'd find on ipads, but the box will 'host' a usb keyboard, so no real worries there. there's piano roll editing for triggers & polyphonic note playback. it will drive external synths &c at the expense of one or more of the pads.... there are sixteen pads available in each "preset" (which are sets of samples & sequences that can be regarded as a high-level 'state' of the machine); each pad can be loaded with a single-hit sample that can be played with the keys or triggered from the pad or the sequencer, or with a 'clip', which can be automatically time-stretched to fit your master tempo. there are many options within the setup for each pad... looping, pitch shift, basic filtering, adsr... so it's possible to get a useable range out of (say) a single piano sample. no multisample support, but you could spread an instrument over two or more pads if you badly needed to use the box this way. delay (syncable) & reverb, basic but useful. many outputs, & these are dc coupled so you can use them as controllers or audio. I could go on.... you can run up to 16 sequences at once, or chain groups of sequences into songs, with loopable sections.... essentially what we have here is a baby octatrack, & then some. if I could change one thing, I would give it an internal battery. maybe make the audio looping a bit more like an electrix repeater, with an overdub/undo mode. but I'm very impressed. will use this for playing long background loops, for midi looping, for running basic midi sequences, for grabbing audio & looping it.....
