There isn’t much actually NEW here, merely the reintroduction of features that were on a PA4x and missing FOR TWO YEARS on the PA5x. Personally, I find this massively troubling, the song and dance and excitement over stuff that SHOULD have been a Day One release feature. Imagine having a supposedly brand new state of the art arranger, and it couldn’t do the basic act of recording an entire performance in MIDI using the arranger….

That’s been on most arrangers for 20+ years. And is pretty integral to using an arranger in music production.

I guess that PA5x users have been stonewalled by Korg for so long, they have forgotten the outrage most users felt when basic stuff like this was missing after they ponied up $4k for what they expected to actually be an improvement over the previous model.

As to the AWOL MOTL arranger, I’m not feeling charitable enough towards Korg to be able to say that maybe they held off on it until the OS from the PA5x was mature enough to be used in the PA1000’s successor. They certainly didn’t hold off from the PA5x’s release until it was fully functional!

Korg definitely show the signs of disinterest in the arranger market that we saw before Roland bowed out. Long development times, very cursory and slow bug fixing pace, and the abandonment of the low end and middle end lines to concentrate on just the flagship product (much higher profit margin). Not to mention a complete disconnect between development team and customers.

The PA5x’s hardware shows so much promise, but Korg doing the happy dance for simply reintroducing features that should have been there from Day One isn’t doing it justice…