AKAI Professional midimix

The Midimix is a great -but not the best- solution at a great price, if you're looking for a compact midi controller for your DAW.

Quality is excellent - This thing is build like a tank. AKAI is no stranger in manufacturing things that last (my SG01v from 1997 still works flawlessly), and this device is no exception. It feels substantial and very sturdy!

The faders are small, but it seems that their value distribution is logarithmic, so as you raise the fader you get better precision! They work well. However what is disappointing, is that the knob height is short, meaning that while you can, of course, twist them, you can't get a firm grip on them, very easy.

Besides the official configuration for Cubase, you can also get unofficial Remote codecs for Reason in GitHub. By default the unit is configured to control 6 parameters x 8 channels. However I've created my own setup, that maps all knobs to one selectable channel. This gives me more control from the unit.

In the end, Midimix may not be the best controller, ergonomically speaking, however it will fit nicely on a small desk space, and it will last for many years!

I'm a studio one user so this doesn't have the full integration, hence the title. The midi function still works but has rendered the faders almost useless, you can't swap fader banks, so if you're using more than 8 tracks, you'll have to use MIDI learn every-time you want to do swap them

On the positive side, it's made EQ plugins much easier with the amount of knobs at your disposal; with Pro EQ (studio one built in plugin) you can assign each band to different knobs which has sped up work flow which is the main reason why I bought it

I'm still very happy with it, if it was able to integrate the same as Ableton then I would be over the moon

I have used this controller in many performances since buying it due to its obvious ease of use, organized design and portability. Overall, its a great controller, exactly what you see with a decent build quality. When using it with ableton, though, the firmware does not create a red "ring" around the selected tracks that are being controlled. For this reason, rather than use it out of the box to control basic mix settings as it is originally configured to do, I always custom map the whole thing to control other things like instrument parameters. So it takes a little more setup than my other AKAI controllers. Once set up like this its pretty much perfect though.