Well the pads must be broken in, make sure you get the newest os update so you can adjust the pad sensitivities to your liking. AWESOME. it has a flashable rom in it, so you can flash your own sounds into the rom, so you can make your own presets that load very fast automatically when you turn the unit on. saves so much time, with samplers its all about load, save.. takes so much time, set this one up once, and its instant gratification over and over again like a drum machine should be. I upgraded mine to 128mb of ram which is plenty, this is a one shot sample playback, drum machine sampler, its not meant to make keyboard maps, buy a emu for that. this is for drums. and drum loops. easy to get files off my pc. i re did all my drum kits from all my old drum machines and samplers in this thing and have them set up as presets. the pads are ultra responsive and very expressive. loads .wav files, usb connect to the pc for file management and import of any .wav drum sounds or fx. Ultra tight envs, and punchy like a drum machine should be! bitchen…. a permanent piece, i will never ever sell this thing. my ultimate industrial drum box. its a portable sampler to boot, not big, perfect size. sampler quality is pretty good too, i like the dacs better on this than the s5000 i had.