Yeah what’s funny is sometimes you watch how people work and it’s Sample Loop and One Shot, No movement just static sample sequence… and they find the OT too complicated. But their workflow are dead simple, Load Sample in Audio Pool, double clic on the track left click choose the machine (ok your music is simple go static) Load the sample, put trigs. END.
What’s so complicated 
…
I think the universe breeds OT musicians and non OT musicians…
We’re either one or the other and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Sometimes we have a hard time understanding each other, what’s absolutely genius for an OT lover is a nightmare for a non-OTer…
Sometimes it takes a bit to figure out if your an OTist or not…
Either way is perfectly fine, there’s no reason to need to like the OT if you just don’t…
There’s something to this which isn’t as bad as it sounds. It doesn’t mean your limited to what you can do, it means the OT has another way of doing the same thing which at first isn’t really apparent or intuitive, but later makes a lot more sense and then clicks.
You end up with the musical idea you were after, just using a method that no other machine/software uses…
The more you get used to the method, it turns from a roadblock to an enabler…
There’s also something about using any piece of gear towards its strong points. If your willing to go more in the direction of what the OT excels at, the music although of a slightly narrower scope, can be more exciting and different, with still plenty of room for diversity and uniqueness… I have an OT so I’m gonna make it do OT stuff, not stuff that other things do, and not just like a DAW, this thing has some tricks I really enjoy that are special to it so I run with those. If I didn’t like its tricks I probably wouldn’t use it, but since I do I try to make them shine…
Yeah, 100% on that, and I might not have been clear, for certain things it is fantastic, but for what I do, bread and butter stuff comes out much more easily on an mpc type platform. And the beauty of the 2 boxes system for me is that you get out of each other’s limitations.
Honestly, I come from a background where I want to make my electronic gear fit around my guitar playing so sometimes the octatrack doesn’t work so well for me in that sense.
But it also opens up stuff that would be impossible otherwise in hardware.
I still think it’s a dr octorex on steroids in hardware.
I decided somewhere along the line I’m willing to adapt my playing to fit with the machines, less stressful for me and just easier to flow along… No right or wrong though, every musician has their methods…
I haven’t heard about this Dr. Rex 
I’ll have to investigate now!
It’s a reason rack thing, quite capable imo.
Wait… you can Label tracks?
… using the appropriate paper and tape, or adhesive labels, yes!
Heh, underrated comment
omg ur right!!! it doesn’t come off but thats okay. pics to come…
I took a long break from electronic music and jsut played in bands for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, and I was considering a k2500rs for a while when I got back in to it and started moving to hardware, butthey were around $250 and at the time I didn’t want to put that much money into a sampler since I already had an MPC2kxl. By the time I realized I’d actually really like to have one, the price had gone up quite a bit.
A frend of mine has built his entire rig around a K2500, Casio VZ-10m, TX802 and MPC1000, but he’s thinking about losing the MPC entirely because he hardly uses it since he got the Kurzweil.
Yeah, it’s kind of like how you have to conform to how a piano works, or a guitar. When you think of it in those terms it doesn’t seem so much limiting as defining.
I actually agree with this in a way, I love the older MPC workflow and the easy musicality of tapping stuff out on the pads, except for me the MPC I had (which I really like and didn’t want to replace with a different MPC even if it had more features) couldn’t record and play back at the same time, and I was really wanting to get into a sort of “build a basic track from existing samples, record loops over it live, and then chop those loops and rearrange them” approach and the OT can of course do that easily. It just turned out that hwen I had the thing, that was the least exciting (to me) stuff it could do.
Lately I hardly use it for sample playback of any kind and am more using it for MIDI sequencing and then processing the output of the external gear, starting from an empty pattern and building things up live.
I have to say im really not into this marmite way of looking at it. I love the octatrack it makes me smile but i end up with a few loops and nothing else and it sucks all the time out of me so ill probably get rid of it at some point or maybe keep it around if my bank will allow me to. I see it for its pros and its cons and that’s about it for me
I not yet loving the OT. At the moment it’s just an expensive Sequencer for my Dominion 1. I did the obvious slicing,scenes and stuff but I didn’t dig that deep yet.
I’m busy learning the RYTM inside out for going the live act route some day. When the AR becomes second nature, I will fully concentrate on all the things OT has to offer.
I went through a lot of frustration like others but decided to stick with the OT and reached a new peak of joy at the moment.
My buying intent 2 years ago was the ability to perform with sounds and loops more spontaneously than my previous approach which was using software. I feel I am almost at that point now. Some big limitations have to be accepted and worked around. I wish it had four stereo outs, Overbridge or some way to bake out all the song’s tracks to wav. I think when using only static machines one might be able to record about 45 seconds on all tracks at once.
Even though I read the manual and the Merlin guide several times before and after buying the OT, it took me 2 years to find a workflow strategy that I am happy with (only got to do stuff on weekends mostly). Actually I am still experimenting. The manuals/docs contain all the info but the mind and muscle memory needs time to accommodate and utilize all of it (lotsa button shortcuts)
My current strategy is to just fill in something to each track very quickly, no finicking around but just have fun making beats.
Now I just play around, finding new combinations of loops, playing the mutes, triggering fillins, playing the delay mode. And now you can also add conditional trigs that play a random fillin every fourth time or so. If you have a Midi-Synth/Sampler etc., you can do the same using program changes with those 8 tracks as well. This is my live approach.
I also have a yamaha QY700 connected, so I can even record all the muting and triggering that I do multiple passes of knob tweaking and record into a DAW later (which is a bit painful since there are only two stereo outputs but yeah, it’s my only big gripe).
It’s a really cool machine and I do love it! But man, it takes a lot of discipline as there is almost no undo (in some cases you have one undo but it’s really easy to lose it). When you break something, hiting the wrong button and did not save before (or lost your one-off undo) - it’s easily gone forever. So resample anything you like as soon as possible!
Still not sold on Octatrack. When I learned the Rytm, I thought for sure I would love Octatrack for samples. Unfortunately, I mostly use it as an expensive MIDI sequencer. I love the 3 LFOs per track and Dark reverb, but I couldn’t get anything done. I’m beginning to think it’d more useful as a Performance (Surprise!) instrument and not a tool to make tracks. I invested a lot of time into figuring it out so I’m hesitant to sell it yet. Went back to using Ableton Live as my brain/multitrack recorder and am much more productive. SAD!
I was just making a goofball generalization about how the OT is often a love/hate type thing were some folks get one and can’t stand it so end up selling, and others think it’s the greatest thing since sliced samples and will never get rid of it…
I’m not one to promote stereotypes and there’s always exceptions so please feel free to break my generalization…
But in the sake of being a goofball and rolling with it: 
OTist
non-OTer
I have a love hate relationship with the OT. It’s taken me to some crazy high places playing live, and it’s let me down by failing in the worst ways. But when it comes to taking my studio songs and turning them into something I can then perform with, nothing is as fluid as the OT so I keep using it. It’s such a perfect fit for the way I like to play live that I really can’t think of using it for anything else either. I keep trying to branch out and use it for other tasks, but in the end I end up in that same workflow. Doh.
Octatrack, I love you, I hate you.
I like the way Sezare56 put it! 
I love him. But I don’t give him the attention he deserves.
Too much toys these days.