NanoKONTROL 2 Black : Good, great for the price, but could be better

I bought this to have some easy physical control of a home recording setup using the Samson Studio GT interface (bundled with Cakewalk Sonar X1 LE) and a small laptop.

Good things are that life is much easier with physical transport controls plus level on 8 channels plus buttons for record, mute and solo on each channel. Compared to working on a small computer screen it's just faster and easier and more relaxed. So I'm pleased with the purchase and for the price it's excellent value for money.

Less good things are the manual, there are instructions for interfacing with the various DAW software packages but those for Sonar are really not complete and it took me a long time and a lot of false starts to get the nanoKontrol installed and working. There are a few vital steps not explained. The worse thing is that having installed it, I think I've forgotten how I did it so I can't pass it on here. You'll have to study the various settings on your DAW software and read anything you can find online about nanoKontrol.

Also the buttons don't behave completely correctly. I tried switching on the record on all channels (mainly to see what would happen) and on the last channel the button would not light up, but when I pressed a different control the record button did light up.

So that feels like a software problem and I suggest you keep an eye on what settings you have before you start recording. I overwrote a track and I can't work out if I forgot to turn off record on that channel or the software turned it back on for me. But I'm definitely suspicious of it and looking out for random acts of vandalism by the software.

I haven't tried to reassign any of the controls but having read about it it looks like there is not a way to re-assign the rotary 'Pan' control to act as an input gain control. I think that's a midi issue but it's not helpful. I would also like to assign that pot to effects but again it's not clear whether you can do it. Given the vagueness of the instalation instructions I think I'll follow the rule of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and not bother to try the NanoKontrol software which you need to do any reconfiguration.

So basically it is very good value, it gives you direct control of the main settings for recording and mixing and for the price I don't think there is anything that offers more useful features. It's not a high precision device but it's good enough for a home studio.

As I'm only recording voice and acoustic instruments it is more useful to me to have good controls for 8 channels than the keyboard that comes with most of these midi controllers that offer fewer mixing controls. Anyway I have an old keyboard with midi output if I ever need that.