Akai U-40 Riff-O-Matic

This device is remakably simple to use, with a sleek minimum of controls, inputs and outputs. It is very intuitive.

In the simplicity of inputs, you lose stereo capability. This can be rememdied with a very inexpensive little mixer from Radio Shack.

If you have never heard music at digital half speed before, you might be expecting perfect fidelity. Don't! But this device sounds very good.

I have used this device extensively for about six years and never had any problem with it whatsoever! I would not recommend dropping it, though.

Because of the unit's simplicity and durability, I never needed customer support.

I love this thing! It was the best investment I made in my musicianship. I have been so happy with it that I have not tried to replace it with something "better". I am now a professional guitar transcriber, and this is my workhorse.

Quite easy to use. However: it uses a mini-plug for the Line In, which is mono. This means if you want to sample a guitar solo that is primarily panned to one of the stereo channels coming from your CD player, you'd better pick the right channel.You could get a Y-adapter to combine L/R channels into mono.
The mainy inconvenience I find is that there is no ability to pause during playback, you can only loop over and over your sample. Sure, you can set it to loop just a little portion of the recorded sample, but this is fiddly- it would be easier to hit pause just to work on one measure, for example.

Simple: Pitch control,sample rate, loop start/stop, note grabber.

This is where the thing falls short for me.I find the lower sample rates pretty useless. Sounds just great at the high-res sample rate at normal speed; however, when slowed down to 2/3 speed the fidelity is pretty awful. Forget about getting any sense of the expressiveness in a guitar solo, or getting a feel for a string bend. You're lucky if you can make out individual notes from the mud. The pitch does remain true while slowed-down, but the tone is total mud.

No problems, though I haven't used it too much.

N/A

This unit just went into the trash. I couldn't re-sell it and disappoint someone else.
Maybe their new (U-400) up-graded model sounds better??

Piece of cake. Plug in a CD player, plug in the power, plug in an amp or headphones, push a couple of buttons and you're done. Instructions are very straightforward.

This had the most features of all of the riff-decoders that I was able to find. I didn't want a PC program because it's a pain to haul my guitar gear near the PC. This riff decoder allows you to store up to 13 seconds (26 secs at lower sound quality). It has a lot of options on how to capture that sound. Once you've captured the riff, you can subdivide into exactly the part you want and loop it over and over. Then it lets you slow it down, change the pitch (nice when you're working on a blues riff played 1/2 step lower since you don't have to retune your guitar), capture individual notes, and even filter out the frequencies you don't want so you can hear the instrument you're interested in. Let's you also plug your guitar right in and mixes along with the riff you've sampled or the raw CD you play with it.
Would be nice if it would store the riff when you power down, or better yet would store a variety of riffs for future study.

It's a digital sampler. When you slow riffs down, it has to fill in the space somehow, so it has a rough sound. But in my view, this isn't intended to be a hi-fi playback device, it's a device to slow down riffs so you can learn to play better. And it works fine for this.

IT looks a lot tougher than the Sabine Backtrackers. I haven't had any problems.

Haven't had to contact them.

I'd have to get another one if something happened to this one. This has had a tremendous impact on my ability to play lead riffs that previously I couldn't play.