The Future of Hardware DAW Control Surfaces

I would go with a Mackie Control. Yes its old but that in and of itself is a recommendation.

You should get one of these ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HHiXqcyu2M

;-)

Heheh. Wow indeed. I stole that from the CH (forget who posted it). I was just trying to find out how much it costs to no avail which means it's likely the equivalent to the down payment on a house. :-/

Maybe if all us active forum members pitch in ten bucks we could afford the trackball and keyboard.

Soon cometh this in my sig

Feature list locked.
Debugging last hard bugs.
Full Inline ProChannel Support
32 knob ACT
More cool than words.

Hey I'm with beepster, wait a sec, I have that extra $million I forgot about. LOL.  

But that does bring to the forefront of where I think the market is heading.  With windows 8 being primarily a touch screen OS mostly used on ipads, I'm wondering if anything new will break at the winter NAM along the touch screen platform in the price range of us mortals.   I'm a little gun shy right now about buying a known legacy controller.  My Yamaha 01X became a boat anchor when drivers were not supported past Win XP, and yes the Mackie support is still here now but I would feel a lot more comfortable buying a current model if they had one.

I am very disappointed that Roland has not come out with a smaller version of the V-Studio 700c.  the V-100 and v-20 does not have what I need and the 700C  well I'm not totally sold it's as solid as they say it is (reading about problems with 64bit drivers).  So I will wait awhile (it gives me time to save, as I have just spent a small fortune on my system upgrade.)  In the meantime I will keep looking foreword  to your suggestions, That's why I love this forum because all of you ROCK.

thanks,
mpop

BlixYZ


Soon it will all be touch screens s controllers (don't listen to the nay sayers, it's gonna happen). 

sad, but true... like lemmings the populace rushes to use technology that benefit the manufacturers, not the users.

may end up with the Mackie anyway.

That Slate control surface is pretty cool. Of course, it has to be 'honking' huge. There's no way a touch screen will work with our fat fingers if the screen is loaded with a thousand little buttons unless you either:
A: reduce the number of geegaws on the screen to make the remaining ones bigger (not likely with this crowd...)
B: or make the screen even more 'humoungouser' to contain them


I'm not sure what the aesthetics are of a monster screen 20 inches from your face, but it sounds like a headache generator to me. Time will tell.

When researching a control surface for Sonar, I found the Mackie was out of my budget, so a single-fader style unit was my next choice. It came down to the FaderPort vs. the AlphaTrack. I choose the AlphaTrack as it had the better feature set (from my perspective).

However, after researching it looks like Frontier Design is in hibernation and the AlphaTrack is no longer manufactured. I though about it for about 0.2 seconds and decided to get from eBay and I'm happy with it.

A future design I'd like to see (assuming I ever run into some money...) is something similar to the Mackie with the following changes/features.


- My perfect surface....
a: Replace the old LCD scribble-string with a meter bridge.

b: OLED strip for track names.

c: 4 pots per track (32 total) , ea with small OLED above it for name/value display

d: Buttons to allow you to switch the pots from per track (sends or eq, etc.) to plug-in parameters for the 'selected track' - the OLED displays automatically update to reflect the current plug-in, status, etc.

e: a general purpose assignable touch-screen similar to the Euphonics so you could make your own macro buttons and combinations, etc.


Now back to stinking reality....

The Raven can't work with Sonar X series.

It is too cluttered, and has a customizable toolbar.

Touch works pretty well by now, my secondary monitor is multi touch, I use it when I work from my 88 weighted keys. It's mounted on a heavy duty vesa arm so I can position it any way I want.

Only thing that needs to be fixed is the faders/knob problem that every DAW I've tried has, no idea why it can't work.

Once that's fixed, I'm getting a large 40" non-capacitive (infrared like my current one, much better since they use glass that's hard to scratch) touch screen and building a custom  studio desk with the screen built in at an angle so I can rest my hands on the table and ditching my controllers.

My reason for going with touch asap is that I've never ever found a controller that does it all, and then I end up having to switch between more than one or click banks, scroll though presets etc.. and once I'm done with that, it has taken longer than just grabbing the mouse, making the controller completely pointless.

No setup, no wear or tear, no special drivers, no reliance on special hardware and since everyone is pushing it so hard with win8 now, good high resolution multi touch will become dirt cheap.