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I just bought a new laptop for music production (17-in Dell i5/8GB/750GB) and I went shopping for a compact MIDI controller yesterday with the intention of buying an AKAI, Novation, or possibly an M-Audio. Every one of them felt like a flimsy-ass over-priced, Chinese-made plastic POS and the keyboard action on all of them sucked donkey balls. I was getting totally disillusioned, when I noticed that they had the Arturia "The Player" hybrid synth/controllers in stock. I opened one up and was blown away by the construction on this thing! It's built like a tank, has solid wood side panels and aluminum housing and the keyboard action is almost as nice as my Virus'. And, to top it all off, it was far cheaper ($149!) than the other garbage controllers I was looking at. It's also USB powered (no AC or batteries needed), and the included synth player is actually kinda cool, although very limited in this particular model.
All of the buttons and knobs are dual-mode (using the Shift key) and mapping them to my software was a piece of cake. I'm not sure why this keyboard doesn't get honorable mention when people are asking which MIDI controller to buy, but Arturia wins hands-down in the compact controller market IMO. Hell, I might buy the 61-key version now.

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