Icon Platform Nano

I'm a freelance sound designer who works mostly on Film/TV/Video Game productions. I decided to buy the icon nano to give me a better tactile feeling when working from home because of it's small footprint. I read some reviews and was a bit sceptical, but decided to go for it anyways.

After trying it for a week I'm returning it.

Here is what I like about it:

- It takes up almost no space!
- The presentation is nice and the controller itself feels rugged.
- Having the 4 knobs included alongside the fader.

Now what I don't like:

- Horrible implementation.
- Most features don't work as advertised.
- Requires a lot of setup on the users end.
- Limited information and support available on the internet.
- Motorized fader doesn't have smooth action and has trouble keeping up with the project
- Knobs feel horrible and have no feedback for what you're doing

Before buying one, make sure to research how much your DAW of choice actually supports it. Icon claims to have support for most platforms out there, but in my case (Reaper, Logic Pro x) this meant that only some of the basic functions worked. (Play, record, solo, mute. Even the zoom doesn't work properly!) After searching forums and trying a lot different solutions (even customer support for Icon recommended using drivers made by someone else) I got most of the functionality in the controller working, but it was still fairly lacking. Only solution to get it completely working seemed to be to code it myself from the ground up and that isn't something I'm going to do with my limited knowledge. This has been enough of a headache as is.

I guess I got what I payed for

Hopefully this review helps someone who is deciding on what gear to buy!

I was initially excited to receive this controller, the packaging and general construction of the unit is great and it looks great on your desk.

However when using it with Cubase 11, I found that the banking doesn't work, the mute and solo buttons intermittently stop toggling, the faders sometimes lock preventing you from adjusting levels.

In cubase 10.5, banking works over 16 channels (two banks of 8), but no further.

For my purposes and in my DAW this just doesn't work in a way that I can use and it's too glitchy.

Also Icon's tech support and general documentation is, to put it politely, inadequate.

I'm a happy user of an Icon Platform M+, so I thought adding a Nano to my setup. Unfortunately it was a very bad experience, the device finally broke and won't turn on, after little over a year of use. I had some many issues with it, that I won't get it repaired and I'm happy to replace it with a different controller.

Some good things first:
- it has a good fader (Alps) which is not noisy, at least when it's calibrated with low speed.
- the design is great, very nice, compact and ergonomic.
- the small LCD screen is very nice and readable, much better than the MCU-style displays with blue background.
- it has a power switch.
- it's nice to have 8x bankable buttons.
- they improved the rubber buttons which are no more bleeding light to other buttons nearby.
- the jog wheel works fine, although it needs some kind of grip.
- LED lights of the buttons have the perfect intensity, a touch less than the Platform M+ (except the RGB lights, see below).

Now the issues:

- touch sensitivity of the fader is poor, much worse than the Platform M+. I think it has some kind of grounding issues, if you calibrate it to be with the correct sensitivity, it will activate by itself (like a ghost touch) when the fader moves. Only workaround is to set a low sensitivity and each time fight against the fader not recognizing your touch.

- the device emits some kind of whining noise, it's very annoying if you work in a quiet studio. The noise changes when you change RGB colour! The Platform M+ is completely silent by comparison.

- the RGB lights for the button banks are too strong, apart from being disturbing, they lit the buttons so much with a background colour, that it's hard to notice when a button is active.

- it has some kind of chemical smell. After a year it's still there!

- if you set the fader with a medium-high speed it will stutter. They could improve the servo control so that it slows down when it gets closer to the value, rather than reaching the value at maximum speed then jumping back.

- The V-Pots (rotary encoders) are pretty useless, they are poorly implemented: unless you turn them super slowly, they'll randomly send wrong midi messages like if you had turned them in the other direction, causing the value (e.g. L/R panpot) to go up and down. Also, it's nice to have 4 extra encoders, but they are not very useful without a screen or a led ring at least. The main VPot will usually duplicate one of the 4 extra VPots, depending on which channel you are on.

- Not totally Icon's fault, but the software implementation is very akward, with the controller moving within the bank of 8 channels of the MCU protocol. To me it doesn't make sense to have a MCU-based single channel controller. This kind of controllers is best used to control the selected channel (like the CC121). You could do your own programming to achieve that but with the platform Nano you're then stuck with two options: either use the akward and jumpy MCU mode, or use the generic programmable midi mode. Unfortunately in the generic mode the fader resolution is only 7 bit instead of 14. Ideally, it would be great to have a generic MCU mode, where each control is sending a single midi message and you're not jumping between channels.