*NEW* MASCHINE 1.8 update and features. Best sampler now on market

I've been a maschine user for about a year now. The maschine mikro was my first piece of equipment and software for music production. overall i felt it was a good stepping stone into music making. Quickly found its limitations though. About 6 months ago I got the ableton Live 8 suite and put maschine down for a while to learn it. Maschine does a few things that imo are preferable to ableton and vice versa. the instruments available in maschine are amazing however i was limited in this area by having a mikro due to lack of knobs and limited recording of automation compared to the way a full maschine controller handles it. I like Abletons automation better than machines and feel its a step above in that area. One other thing that i feel limits machine(or at least mikro users) is the inabilty to use a separate controller with knobs for the software. ableton is completely mappable where maschine is noty. At least with maschine I could plug in my 61-key yamaha keyboard to use for instruments but would be nice if i could use my s2 in midi mode to control the 8 knobs in maschine, guess this is why the mikro was cheaper. obviouslt the timestretch in ableton was a huge bonus that maschine did not offer. That what i am most excited about. at one point i explored maschines ability to DJ using samples similar to clip launching in ableton. It was successful as long i was using songs in the same BPM but now i am definitely going to re-explore that with addition of timestretch. Maschine will now be hands down the best sampler on the market. I love abletons"simpler" but I have a feeling maschine is gonna be way more fun to use now. Just hope the quality and process of warping a track in Maschine is simple. Gonna download the update now but at work so wont have a chance to play with it until late. Let us know what your new favorite features are and how this update will or will not change the game or breath life into the maschine movement. i know for me personally its making me dust off my mikro and see what this thing can do now.