VCI 380 experts please help!

Hi guys, any help MUCH appreciated!

Am considering upgrading my Vci 300 mk2 and have been looking at the 380 and 400. I think I prefer the 380 for ease of use and set up, the velocity feature on the pads, and the browser on the 380 with forward and back buttons looks better too.

But i had a couple of questions,

1. I have seen that with serato DJ you can now set in and out loop points on the 380, which is an important feature to me. Would I have to pay extra to get the serato DJ or will I be able to use it for free? right now I have itch installed on my mac.

2. Does anyone know if I can use the sampler and effects at the same time? And do that all through the controller without using the keyboard or mouse on my laptop? I would be interested in being able to let samples play and add effects to them as I am mixing. And would I be able to control the levels of the samples using the controller also? or would i have to use the laptop to do so?

Help MUCH appreciated…
Will

Not sure on the effects but SDJ is a free upgrade for itch users. My friend has a 380 and it's solid as hell and a great controller from my brief experience with it.

1) 380 comes with full SDJ, you shouldn't need to pay anything, the manual looping functionality works out of the box with the 380, double tap the fourth pad mode to get into manual loop mode

2) the sp-6 sampler just plays samples, FX can be routed on top of these, so yes can play them together. You can trigger them with the pads (secondary mode on hot cue mode).

Yes you can also midi map the sample triggering / FX controls to an external controller or play them from the keyboard if you aren't happy using the ones on the controller. FX controls on the 380 are designed for itch so they are not the most intuitive. SDJ standard know is four knobs all alongside each other, 380 has one above line fader, one (linked to velocity) on the top corner and another accessibly via a shift.

Also as of a couple of releases ago SDJ has a midi mappable software filter, I really wish that was the control above the line fader, but since you can't remap you can achieve this only by sacrificing an FX slot.

I have yet to see anyone do anything special with the velocity triggering, I found it more of pain than anything because its hard to use subtely (all or nothing) especially when you are in the heat of it hitting a cue or loop pad. Also if you want to use FX2 it always turns velocity on which can be a pain when you use external control then hit a cue and it resets your FX param amount.

One cool way to use it echo out while you are cue point juggling/slicing or switch to manual loop mode and use the non assigned pads to try to be subtle.

The browser knob setup works well.

Haven't used a 300 but from what I can tell the line faders are longer than the 380 which might take some getting used to.

I put a cf-x2 in mine which is an awesome cross fader. Am actually in progress to sell my 380 since I moved to a ddjsx2, PM me if you are interested.