You just have to try it and see how it works out. I don’t use mine as I thought I would have, it opens and closes doors for me…working out how you want to use it is everything.
btw Hands down worst thing for me is the encoders. I have the whole machine mapped to a faderfox device, if i didn’t have that tbh i’d never use it.
Can you expand on what is bad about the encoders? Is it that they are endless?
Can’t tap tempo with one hand unless you have Hulk hands.
I just don’t like how they feel. I’ve had them replaced under warranty because they were wobbly and loose feeling. That said they never malfunctioned. There’s stuff on here if you search around.
That can be scary indeed. 
Run away while you still can!
It is too heavy, so the rubber feet will slide off if you hang the OT on the lid of your piano.
For me i got the octatrack because i needed a looping machine with decent syncing ability
Then it took on midi and drum machine duties too. I got interested in producing electronic music again.
This was great fun - I put a sort of lofi loop based, Actress influenced live set together and performed.
Now it is sitting on my shelf doing nothing while I try to put a new recorded project together.
Next time I use it will be for playing stems back live probably. I don’t think I’m the type of musician that gels perfectly with the Octatrack, but it seems many users feel like that. It is better than anything else to do certain things - but it’s not ableton. In ableton, you really can do anything. I’ve heard people calling this ‘Ableton in a box’. This isn’t true.
It is super super fun but for me as a tool to actually get things done… it can slow things down.
Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends.
IMHO, the timestretching sounds terrible.
Don’t do it.
I love my Octatrack though … 
The OT is PSYCHOTIC and will seduce your mind into thinking that You are the problem.
Mine does this all the time to me…
Last night, for example. I had a good groove going, finally thinking I was understanding parts and their relationship to patterns… took a short break, came back sampled in new David Attenborough clip for fodder ( which I knew I did right! ) and now I couldn’t hear it…
The OT PURPOSEFULLY kept the settings I’d had with the old sample even tho they made the new one inaudible…
Or how after that, I keep hearing some small signal delays driving me mad… I hit Stop Stop real fast and they’d quit… check all my channels, NO DELAY ON ANYWHERE…
It took me 10 minutes to find out this Spiteful, Hateful machine was still playing back my TRC / Trigless Trig experiment exactly as I’d laid it out, until I removed the said trigs from its path.
Imagine… making you think you know a machine, only to find out, it’s NOT doing what you think you know or did, but rather what you did and told it to do.
It has no presets, and forces you to set it up to accomplish your goal first, rather than come out the box ready to do something, furthermore, it’ll make you figure out what you want it to do before any of the other stuff I said is even possible.
A completely psychotic diva of a machine.
Others have mentioned the data housekeeping, the fact that the I/O is short ( I GOTTA HAVE looooooong 1/4" stems baby ), seriously underpowered for a moto, and Electron has been dragging their feet and moving promises regarding if the OverBra will ever actually be a complimentary piece of kit to the PL-2…
Avoid it, and save your sanity.
I’ve been on daily intensive therapy, and I’m happy to say I can look in the mirror and be happy with who I see. The OT almost convinced me otherwise in less than 6 months.
I guess that’s why all the OT owners I see look like they’ve aged 20 years. Stressful machine. I hear Dataline is actually a 12 year old kid. Talk about stress!
Do yourself a favour and buy it. I will not lie, and even I did, it wouldn’t treat your GAS. There is nothing like it. It’s not just a sampler it’s a Performance Sampler-Sequenzer who ads 24 LFOs to the rest of your setup.
I liken the OT to the video game series ‘Dark Souls.’ You have to learn the levels, remember how to beat each and every enemy, and try over and over and over to beat the bosses. It’s frustrating as hell sometimes, but if you learn it, you will feel satisfied.
Just my two Cenks.
Sometimes you’ll get a really good idea going and won’t be able to resist just jamming on it for like an hour and then realize you didn’t save first and you’ve gone so far from where you started that you cant find your way back to the good idea that started it all to begin with.
So in that sense the OT can be inefficient sometimes.
What is it that can be frustrating as hell about it? I hear that a lot about it. Curious since I’m almost ready to buy a used MK1. The Digitakt hasn’t been frustrating for me, for example. Pretty straightforward machine.
My OT can be kind of slutty.
Can’t leave it alone for 5 minutes without it hoeing around.
Last night it started giving me lots of lip about it too, like it’s my fault or something.
Run dude, while you can.
See Supercolor_T-120’s comment, above.
If you don’t save your recordings as a sample before you turn off your machine: Gone! Even if you save the project. Sucks when you have a drunken jam with friends and find out the next day you have a bare bones drum track with none of the awesome recordings you made last night.
It’s a little (or a lot) deeper than the Digitakt. For me, digging into the routing of the tracks and parts and the tons of trig condition settings took a while. I finally coughed up the 5 euros to watch Dataline’s Bandcamp video on live sampling and it is totally worth it.
I like my Digitakt… but I love my OT. Buy the MKI, play with it for a month. If you hate it, sell it for what you paid for it. You will end up loving it.
It’s the hot girlfriend that flirts with other guys. You won’t like that part, but damn, she’s just so hot.
It probably took about a year or so for me to not keep getting stuck in those pitfalls having me wonder if I’m using the right machine…
After about a year or so, I can’t really remember, the pitfalls were happening less and less and the stuff I heard come out of it at that point all in all made me feel comfortable it’s a keeper…
By now I feel super comfortable with it, but I’m 3 years in…
This is seriously something to consider, it might take a year to even know if you really like it or not… 
too many shift+button functions. Otherwise it sounds really good (some people don’t think this)