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My local place (Gear4Music) had new stock of the Arturia Keylab Essential 49 this morning so I ordered it for next day delivery. Will post my views once I have it all set up. Thanks @abacab for the recommendtion. Gear4Music also had new stock of the Nektar Impact LX49+ but in the end, as something that I will interact with a lot in the music making process, the Arturia won me over. Plus I can sell my old controller (iRig Keys Pro + ST3 bundle) for a decent amount to recoup some of the cost. Presumably I could also sell my existing copy of AL4 as this keyboard comes with a copy.

Yikes! Keylab Essential 49 wasn't on my radar. Now I'm off to watch a load of YouTube videos on it (maybe in the morning anyway as it is gone half past midnight here in blighty.). Thanks for the suggestion @abacab! Enjoy AL4! UPDATE: It's definitely a contender but, you guessed it, out of stock everywhere in the UK/Europe, including Arturia. Should be good with V Collection as well as AL4. The MIDI Control Centre software also looks very nice for creating your own mappings...

Yes probably a good idea to wait it out abacab as you say. I should just bide my time.. After all, you know what they say.. "purchase in haste, regret at leisure".

Thanks for your reply @Tezza. So annoying that I cannot buy a Nektar. Annoyingly I even found that there were a couple of sales on them before the pandemic with the 49 key version going for around £90.

Thanks Larry. It automatically adds the MODO50 promo code for me (presumably because I own MODO Bass) at the checkout to reduce it by 50 EUR. Works out at 99.99 EUR if you don't pay VAT or 119.99 EUR if you do. Still on the fence.

Definitely, I think we got it at the same time Mesh ?

In my search for a new 49 key controller with integrated transport, pads, faders and knobs I had pretty much decided on a Nektar Impact LX49+ but for some reason (COVID-19?) in the UK/Europe they are out of stock everywhere and the "stock expected" date seems to keep moving to the right. Maybe a new model is due? IDK. Anyway, looking slightly higher up the price scale I then found the Novation Lauchkey 49 Mk2 which is in stock at Amazon for next day delivery. It seems to tick all the boxes but I wondered how well its features could be integrated into CbB. Are there any Launchkey owners here who are using one successfully with CbB and if so how easy was it to set up and use all of the features in CbB? I'm sure I read that the Launchkey series have fixed configs for specific DAWs (InControl?) which would make it tricky to use in non-supported DAWs. I don't mind doing a bit of manual configuration if that is possible but would only want to have to do this once so that anything that I have manually set up could be saved and recalled for future use. I do also have Studio One, Cubase, Reaper, Reason and Ableton Live some of which seem to be natively supported by Launchkey but I use these less than CbB .

Interesting, thanks Yeto. Band-in-a-box has been my goto for this kind of thing (or ChordPulse for a small footprint alternative). I will definitely check it out though and the price is right

Only thing to note is that I had missing graphics on the multis in Kontakt 6. The fix is mentioned in the installation guide and worked fine for me...

+1 to Larry's comment. I have never seen you play like that before Simeon! I am glad that you only "set fire" to it in a metaphorical way though! Really enjoying the sounds in this thing. So awe inspiring - probably one of my favourite purchases in recent times.

I got a "Coupon usage limit has been reached" message - guess I must have used it before Might work for others though? IDK.

Thanks Larry. Pretty good. They have been quite generous with their free add-ons for ChordPotion so far. Anyone who owns it can find all of them (for ChordPotion and SunDog) here --> https://feelyoursound.com/packages/

I think your reasoning is pretty sound. I currently work mainly with 1080p 60fps limited by my Canon DSLR not doing 4K but I also don't really have the need for 4K. My phone will do 4K funnily enough and it looks pretty good but I just don't want to deal with such a massive increase in file size/processing time when I don't have a pressing need to. Regarding the heat issue I'm also keen to keep things cool but quiet. I did a "noise reduction" upgrade on my existing PC last year using quiet PWM system fans profiled to run at a lower speed most of the time and a Noctua quiet CPU cooler. I know you aren't looking to replace your case but I would also like to get a new one that can use 240 mm system fans which can achieve the same airflow as smaller fans but at a lower speed. Also, seeing StudioNSFW mention NVME drives.... my existing PC motherboard didn't have any NVME slots so I bought a relatively cheap PCIE NVME adapter (something like this one ) and added a 1Tb Sabrent Rocket and this thing absolutely flies! My system already has 3 x 2.5" SSDs but the NVME drive performance is in a different league. The bonus is that almost any AMD motherboard that I get will have NVME slots so I can just transfer it over to the new board without the PCIE adapter.

Nice, and it let me use my $10 voucher to get it for $59.99 ?

Ouch! ?

Good question @Tezza. In the UK Scan Computers make Pro Audio PCs using both AMD and Intel CPUs and they also produce this information page which might help your decision... http://www.scanproaudio.info/ I'm leaning towards a 3900X based system myself at the moment but waiting to see if prices settle back down again once we see light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel. My main PC is used as much for video editing as audio work so AMD seems to have the edge there for me in price/performance at the moment and I don't really need the ultimate in single-threaded performance which Intel seem to have by a small margin. Will be interested to hear what you buy and how it turns out.

Not a whole lot of money either, hmmmm ?

Yes I can see where my voucher's going this month (subject to demo as ever).

Ah yes, nice ? For some reason I now have a retro 80's hankering after one of these... ? https://www.alesis.com/products/view2/vortex-wireless-2 and also one of these... https://www.roland.com/uk/products/aerophone_mini/

Yes I asked the developer about the fact that VirusTotal is showing one detection of W32/InstallCore.CHDH!tr on version 1.0.13 of ChordPrism from the Acronis Fortinet AV engine. There were 70 other AV engines that gave it a clean bill of health including my installed version of Kaspersky AV. Zac from Mosaic Beats responded.. ...which I take to mean that it is a false positive!

If you own an RTX enabled NVidia video card this could be useful for livestreaming etc to cut down background noise. Download here --> https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-guide/ It is now also possible to run this on GTX NVidia cards but I haven't tried it. If you have a GTX card and want try it see this article but you do so at your own risk --> https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/nvidia-rtx-voice-works-fine-on-non-rtx-gpus The demo looks pretty impressive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-mETIjcIV0

Yes, I was a little surprised that the beta code worked on the released product Eusebio. Makes up a little for the fact that I paid for and didn't like or use AutoTheory

I had the original version which was called AutoTheory and while it was good I didn't like that it operated outside your DAW. I was able to get a free upgrade to Chord Prism and I do like it a lot and it is now integrated in your DAW. I also own Scaler and you can do most (not all) of it with Scaler (which is soon to updated). For me I am happy to have both and would recommend Chord Prism. I would definitely buy it at this price if I didn't already own it. This one, Scaler and InstaChord are my favourite apps of this type. I'm not including apps like Rapid Composer and Orb Producer, Sundog, Captain Chords in this as they are full blown songwriting aids - kind of the next step after this. If you are an adept keyboard player then you probably don't need it but as a so so keyboard player it works for me and I really like the new features. You basically have chords on the left octave and notes/arps on the right octave and you set the key on the left and it then gives you the chords for the key on the left octave but also changes the keys on the right octave to fit in with the chord and the key as you are playing them. It doesn't stop there as there are various options for how the notes on the right hand octave are displayed and also for leading notes/7th/9th/11ths for the chords on the left octave. There's even more to it than that so just have a look at these videos...

Thanks Matthew, you must have read my mind!

I found this portable SQL Lite browser which seems to work OK just for viewing the database offline and it's a nice small install in a single folder (being portable). https://sqlitebrowser.org/blog/portableapp-for-3-11-2-release-now-available/ (Kaspersky AV gives it a clean bill of health as does VirusTotal btw) I created a couple of favourites in ST4 and they appeared in the "Instrument" table when I looked in SQL Lite browser. The "is_favorite" field is set to 1 for favourites and otherwise 0, so just put a 1 in the is_favorite filter to see your favourites. This could actually be quite useful for searching instruments when you don't have ST4 loaded or are on a different PC without ST4 (just copy the instrument.db file there for browsing in SQLLite).