I have Play+ and it’s a joy to use. The sequencer is absolutely genius, if you don’t need deep dive into sampling, you have a lot of options to mangling the sound of the samples. Reverb and delay sounds pretty good… I don’t know, it’s fun. And the synth part sounds amazing too.
I’ve done in 20 days a huge 30 minute live set and it was my most succesfull gig to date, only with play+. Drawback is that when you have a very large project it takes time to copy and paste patterns, but with a little bit of patience you can do an incredibly well designed set or more simple songs. As I said, is an awesome device.
I think it’s worth. You can hear the synths in its page and for me sounds great. And you have audio over usb which I’ve still not tried but it’s a big plus.
For sure, this is where I was with the MPC Live for years - it can do the DAW in a box thing to some extent, but I never felt like it was particularly good at this or more to the point that it suited how I like to work. I was always happy enough to just spend an hour here and there finding and chopping up samples on it that I could save to programs and grab when needed to throw together a bunch of alternative sequences either as a track starter or to fit a piece I was working on. But usually didn’t really feel the need to do much arrangement on the box, preferred to bounce out relatively early and/or use the plugin.
I saw a lot of criticism over the years about bloat and it being too much of a DAW which I never really understood - I just use it in the exact same way as I had the MPC1k I had before that. I felt like if other people wanted that other stuff then good for them, but I was happy enough to just use the bits that are useful to me. It’s really just in 3.0 that it looks like they’re going to break the bits I like and the the way I’ve used MPCs for about a decade, seems like there’s going to be no option but to go DAW-lite with it. And yes, I am just a little bit salty about this. I still like the pads a lot, so probably will have a niche just for finger drumming one way or the other.
But basically the SP404 is hitting that same spot, I guess because it has no pretensions towards DAW in a Box it feels like it has more to distinguish it from just doing everything in the DAW from the start, even the back to basics sampling/sequencing approach feels refreshing as against Logic/Ableton.