Prodikeys PC-MIDI
My buddy Stumbled me a link to the Creative Prodikeys website. They were hocking this keyboard for $21 shipped so I jumped on it. I though even if the thing is totally unusable, I am only out twenty bucks. So I gave it a shot..
More after the jump.
So I get this thing and I had not realized how huge it is. Granted, I am kinda spoiled after using apple keyboards for years but damn! However they do manage to cram three octaves into this thing, and that can be quite useful. I have only played with it for a little while, really just long enough to get the midi keys working in Cubase, but so far it is shaping up to be a nifty keyboard. Now don't expect anything awesome from this thing, but if you start out with expectation as low as mine were you should be pleased. Really I was pleased just to get it to work as a midi keyboard. They market this thing as a kids toy and not as a productivity tool. In my opinion they would get a lot more sales if they were pushing this to the Garageband/Reason crowd, but the keyboard is only supported on 32bit windows so that kills a big portion of potential market.
It took me about an hour to figure out that you have to use the mini keyboard app to set the midi output so Cubase could see it. On the original install I didn't even include that app. I have yet to figure out how to get all the launch keys to work. I use Foobar2000 for most of my simple conversion needs when I am in windows and I could not get it to launch using the program that comes with the keyboard. It does not even give you an option as to how you want the media keys to behave. But if you need a keyboard to help you lay down some quick bass lines or step sequence out some drums than it does the job pretty well. I imagine this would be very useful to the laptop musician that is very low on space. Overall, bang for your buck wise, I would say this keyboard is a killer deal for any musician that is doing a bit of midi programing in windows. Don't get me wrong, this thing pretty much sucks. But if you think about the three octaves of keys you get for $20 that still isn't a bad deal. You are still gonna need a real midi controller of some type, but if you are using this along side with a Novation Nocturn then you can really do everything you need and save a lot of space and it would all fit in a travel bag that you could stuff into a overhead compartment. I could only hope some of my readers are traveled enough to need such a feature.