AKAI VIP 3.0 released

[astey]

Any news on development? My only requests would be different skins,(beautiful light theme maybe) and the ability to internally route MIDI from plugins (Cthulhu, Nora, etc..) other than that, VIP has been very good to me.

I wrote Akai on this behalf one month ago. The International Software E-Commerce Manager and Lead Technical support replied independently, that VIP is there flagship software and in development still. Also the new road keyboard will be supported.

Personal take:
1. Watching the latest releases of InMusic, let me guess that the direction of the company is touch. To make this happen the whole ux of VIP must be rewritten and designed, which takes effort and time.
2. Akai advance production and other keyboard series has been stopped, to sell out "old" devices.
3. Akai released the Force controller, which needs its space for marketing and resources for software development /hotfixes.
= Combining these three guesses leads to my conclusion that there might happen something in q2/q3 or Namm 2020

[Orbit-50]

Any news on development? My only requests would be different skins,(beautiful light theme maybe) and the ability to internally route MIDI from plugins (Cthulhu, Nora, etc..) other than that, VIP has been very good to me.

I wrote Akai on this behalf one month ago. The International Software E-Commerce Manager and Lead Technical support replied independently, that VIP is there flagship software and in development still. Also the new road keyboard will be supported.

Personal take:
1. Watching the latest releases of InMusic, let me guess that the direction of the company is touch. To make this happen the whole ux of VIP must be rewritten and designed, which takes effort and time.
2. Akai advance production and other keyboard series has been stopped, to sell out "old" devices.
3. Akai released the Force controller, which needs its space for marketing and resources for software development /hotfixes.
= Combining these three guesses leads to my conclusion that there might happen something in q2/q3 or Namm 2020

Hey, thanks for the info man. Well, seems like they got a lot on their plate so I'm left to assume it's dead, particularly because they stopped the Advanced line which really tied into VIP. I forgot about the release of the Force controller also. The MPC software and hardware line is another thing also. We'll see what happens, but I'm going to make the call now to say we won't see much on VIP anymore. The only good thing, is that it works pretty well as it is now.

[hopkihc]

Makes sense to me.

Touch VIP on a larger screen would be great for browsing and setup/config, never mind the added room, such as making all 8 slots visible simultaneously. I’d assume there would still be encoders, switches, and ( ideally) 9 sliders on any new device.

[rod_zero]

Akai gives me the impression that they release new stuff all the time without really finishing previous releases, maybe if they consolidate everything to a single platform which all devices can benefit from it could be more productive.

[trusampler]

NI once had Schmidts killer app of sound design, Control and DB named Kore(2) and instead of improving on its flaws, integrating it in their ever growing Maschine universe dialed back and closed their software down to their NI ecosystem. Maybe a clever business decision but not so much for their target. Unfortunately after years no one came even close to it with an all in one studio core solution.

100

[trusampler]

Has Akai dropped support for VIP ? I don't find much info on updated plugin maps, any clues?

[chk071]

TBH, i wouldn't be surprised. It never really worked for me, the GUI and operation seemed tedious, and, i doubt that many outside the people who got it with their controllers really bought it. Of course, i could be wrong with that.

[Orbit-50]

TBH, i wouldn't be surprised. It never really worked for me, the GUI and operation seemed tedious, and, i doubt that many outside the people who got it with their controllers really bought it. Of course, i could be wrong with that.

I bought it. I went into it knowing the controller part...well...anyway, I wanted it for the VST preset librarian part. It works really well for that. The chaining part was gravy to me, but the transposing acts really weird, and I didn't see any send effects buses. Doesn't have MIDI plugin routing either for like Cthulhu, Scaler etc.... Not saying that it has to have all of those features, but it sure would've been a hell of lot more useful if it included them. Overall, I think they did a good job with VIP and it's worth what I spent on it.

[zzz00m]

TBH, i wouldn't be surprised. It never really worked for me, the GUI and operation seemed tedious, and, i doubt that many outside the people who got it with their controllers really bought it. Of course, i could be wrong with that.

I'm sure it wouldn't work for everybody! I have a compatible controller, but rarely use the keyboard gimmicks. They do seem a bit tedious, beyond a level of basic MIDI learn.

I prefer to use the mouse and keyboard to navigate the VIP plugin. The features in there blow away Komplete Kontrol!!! The multis in VIP are very powerful, almost DAW like, in that you can assign up to eight instrument parts per multi in a muti-timbral fashion, with four inserts per part, plus 4 busses and a master output, that can each contain 4 inserts.

Then you can create setlists, a collection of patches and/or multis, that can let you arrange an entire live performance. One click loads the next multi instrument in the list ready to go.

And the preset browser is the ultimate way to manage a large library of presets from various soft synths in one place, filtering by instrument, timbre, style, or articulation tags. I have a collection of over 20,000 patches that are searchable in VIP. No more need to open the tiny patch browsers in your old favorites one at a time, hoping to find "that" sound. VIP is scalable to full screen.

[hopkihc]

Agreed. It’s as potent as most hardware workstations I’ve used in terms of the multi feature. I would love to see support for MIDI plugins, VST3, and maybe some lightweight audio input routing.... but if this is all we get, it’s just enough for many of my use cases.

The pre-built mappings aren’t that important to me, but it’s nice having downloadable factory patch libraries as they’re otherwise tedious to import.

[DJ Warmonger]

Has Akai dropped support for VIP ? I don't find much info on updated plugin maps, any clues?

I said that a long time ago. They want to milk the product they already have, but can't quite support a unbounded number of 3rd party plugins. If you find some plugin or map that doesn't work, well - you're unlucky

[zzz00m]

I think that Akai approached VIP patch map development as something that the plugin developers and the user community would provide support for by creating and sharing user maps. Akai created an open format, and turned it loose. Apparently not enough momentum has picked up in this regard.

Yes, Akai did kickstart the process with a number of factory maps, but it probably wasn't ever their plan to create a map for every plugin out there. It would be time consuming and expensive for them to provide new maps on an ongoing basis. But at least you can create a new map if you want one. I really wouldn't expect one company to be able to address an endless supply of plugins. That is just not realistic. There are new plugins being created every day.

NI was probably more clever in this regard by having a limited ecosystem for their NKS standard, and tossing the plugin compatibility standard completely over the fence to the plugin developers. Got that monkey off of their backs really quick!

Compared to NI with the closed NKS compatibility, which only works with supported plugins, VIP is a much more open system which will work with just about anything that follows proper VST standards. Unfortunately there is enough leeway in the VST standard that not all plugins function the same way in a host. So there will be some unlucky ones out there. But it works great with the ones that do work!

And as far as VIP development goes, Akai just released the v3.1 point release last year, so it's too soon to call it dead! https://www.harmonycentral.com/news/aka ... se-vip-3.1

Hopefully they will kick it into gear with VST3 support.

[aMUSEd]

Compared to NI with the closed NKS compatibility, which only works with supported plugins, VIP is a much more open system which will work with just about anything that follows proper VST standards. Unfortunately there is enough leeway in the VST standard that not all plugins function the same way in a host. So there will be some unlucky ones out there. But it works great with the ones that do work!

NKS isn't really closed in relation to supporting plugins, it's just the licensing aspect that is. ie to get officially NKS compatible you have to sign up with NI, however we NKS users have managed so far to make unofficial NKS compatible versions of almost every VST2 plugin we have available, although at the moment NI have not embraced VST3 yet for their own plugins let alone hosting others.

[zzz00m]

Compared to NI with the closed NKS compatibility, which only works with supported plugins, VIP is a much more open system which will work with just about anything that follows proper VST standards. Unfortunately there is enough leeway in the VST standard that not all plugins function the same way in a host. So there will be some unlucky ones out there. But it works great with the ones that do work!

NKS isn't really closed in relation to supporting plugins, it's just the licensing aspect that is. ie to get officially NKS compatible you have to sign up with NI, however we NKS users have managed so far to make unofficial NKS compatible versions of almost every VST2 plugin we have available, although at the moment NI have not embraced VST3 yet for their own plugins let alone hosting others.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad to hear that you can do that!

But the point that I was trying to make was that Akai or NI were not intending to provide plugin compatibility out of the box for a boundless universe of plugins. Just to create a standard, and then let others deal with the details of making their plugins work.

Cheers!

[Psynapsex]

So the crashes got fixed? I'm considering a Advance 49. I like the looks of those big beefy knobs. Wish there was 2 rows of 4 though. I can't stand anything other than endless knobs. Those non motorized faders are for the birds.