advice on Ren, coming from 2kxkl & 4k and switched to live

I have an opportunity to buy a ren from a friend for great price. I've been using ableton live as I found it difficult to manage working with the hardware 2kxl and 4k.

I hear the Ren has it's own application, Is it possible to use the ren conveniently with Live, maybe even assign as a controller for Live?
How does the operation/workflow feel in comparison to the old either 2kxl or the 4k as I've used both extensively?
I wanted to take advantage of the ease of accessing samples/loading and creating songs very easily and saving ease of live while accessing my computers sound library's.
Does anyone recommend the maschine over the Ren? why?

any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Im currently searching old posts, but there's an endless amount of posts to search through.

So I saw this post
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=177682&hilit=renaissance+vs+maschine

MPC REN/STUDIO Midi out in DAW possible yet? june 2
use the Mpc software as a vst in a daw and instead of it recording the midi data in the Mpc software it's recorded in the daw but still triggers the Mpc , like maschine can
Seamlessly integrates with your daw ,is what was written on the box .

So I guess I took for granted that you would be able to do this. Is it true that midi will not record into another daw from Ren? that seems ridiculous if im understanding it right. This is exactly the type of problem I was afraid of. Im trying to make integration of a sequencer and Daw EASIER and integrate right, Im not looking to have weird problems like this that make it difficult to integrate into ableton live.

any other info I need. That right there though, has me thinking the maschine route may be better. if they don't have this working yet, I could not count on them fixing it in the future... can I...
advice?

http://www.akaipro.com/product/mpcrenaissance#downloads

Run the demo. The limitations of the demo are the audio times out after 10 minutes, and of course you can't test the hardware. If you didn't like using the 2k and 4k, you wont like the REN. It shares alot of program building concepts from the older hardware mpc's.