Well... I got my Trigger Finger in the mail a couple weeks ago, set it up pretty quickly and got it to work with Cakewalk SONAR 4 pretty easily.
The only thing I had issues with was reprogramming the pads into a series of 16 patches for my multi purpose drum recording through Drumkit From Hell Superior.
I'm not sure which part of my ineptitude is due to being a total MIDI newbie, or because
the Trigger Finger Enigma program was difficult to figure out. I think I should chalk most of it up to "I was a newbie, and now I am becoming enlightened to the world of MIDI."
Tonight I sat my ass down, opened Sonar and DFHS and decided to make my patches I needed. Basically I wanted the first patch to be a general one that had kick, snare, some hihat functions, and cymbals. Other patches would contain all useful hihats, another would contain all toms (right and left hand hits) for rolls, another for snare work, etc.
First I had to figure out in DFHS which note corresponded to which sound. In DFHS I would select a sub-pad (a snare pad would have a sidestick, flam, right left, etc) then I would see what note it was. I soon figured out that I needed to transpose the note up two octaves in Sonar. No biggie.
I also had to turn the Piano roll in sonar to display the note numbers instead of the keys and notes themselves. So instead of seeing a piano, I saw 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I had to get accustomed to looking at the grey and white lines and the thicker lines to denote the next variant of C.
But, basically, I would find the note in DFHS, transpose it on the piano roll, take that number, then I would program that number on the proper pad and patch in the Trigger Finger software.
Saving and uploading the new info to the Trigger Finger is really easy, but the Trigger Finger doesn't auto update so you have to re-select the patch you were using to re-load the new programming.
But, after about an hour I was able to think-out and program two patches (my general tracking patch and my advanced hi-hat function patch).
I was also able to set the 4th slider to work the hi-hat pedal. It isn't great because it's hard to double hit and slide that thing with any accuracy, but if I got a dedicated Hi-Hat pedal, it would work damn well I think. I just wish I could figure out how to reverse the functionality of the slider. I tried setting the max to 0 and the min to 127 (to reverse the default functionality), but it didn't work. Maybe this is another case of MIDI newbieness.
All-in-all the Trigger Finger seems sweet. I will probably end up using the sliders and knobs for mixing functions in Sonar too.
If you know MIDI really well, you'll probably have a much easier time than I did. If you don't know MIDI but are a fast learner, it will give you some pain but the payoff is worth it.
An advanced piece of hardware, but worth the effort and price IMO.