I was using Akai mpk mini 1 for theater shows during years. Nice little controller, pads/knobs/keyboard and simple editor. The basics, useful, silent knobs... small keyboard
As I've had to buy a apple M1 for a theater company I work for, the mpk mini 1 didn't work for M1 anymore... made me grumpy first... why?
And then I ordered this mk3 that have absolutely nothing new within it except a fragile joystick.
Then I realised that to get the mk3 editor you had to download a 300mo product manager that force you to enter your personnal datas online to access to another platform with tons of unoriginal music softwares and then when you finally find via youtube tutorials how to unlock the "hidden software" category you can access the mk3 editor... and then tadaaa! surprise, you realise that the editor has nothing new and actually it has something less, something totally useful when you use to setup any midi controllers with any daws, it's called "toggle"... so this machine can only trigger things as a gate, you can't change the behaviour of pads as on/off with permanent lights which a very basic thing to do usually. Who is the person at AKAI that one day, one morning, stood up and thought "oh yes let's remove the most f****** basic option that everyone uses!"
Also the knobs are infinite and there is only one display for 8 knobs so you don't know where they are positionned until you touch them and so move them and ruin everything... why they didn't put leds arund knobs like on the apc40?
And by the way, knobs (oct +/- bank, cc , etc) are noisy, just so annoying in a very quiet music environnement and each time you use the controller you have to specify if pads are cc or notes or PC... you can't fix a permanent setup...
OMG! Why all this? These equipments are more and more thought to be used only with ableton Live or ableton-like binary common music flow softwares in a very very very square, quantified and restrained way.
And last but not least, it freezes my Fab Twin 2 synth on Ableton Live, never happened before with any midi controller...
A real piece of nonsense
