I actually have a different experience regarding the use of my “late” MPC Live. I never really got anywhere close to its cpu limit. And I only reached the limit of the ram when I was importing stems of a song that I made. I did manage to keep the ram in control if I only used 4 stem files. But this was a experience where I pretty much bounced the whole 4 mn ish song, so RAM savings can definitely be made.
On on of my normal projects I use 4-8 tracks (2/3 drum tracks, 2/3 midi tracks, 2/3 instruments; occasionally a multisample instrument) and all of those tracks have some kind of fx, always some return fx and no signs of glitches or limitations. I am guessing that Geneoart is a much heavier user, so I think its important to state that you might reach the limit of the machine, or not, depending on what you do and how you will use it.
As I stated a few lines above I am now buying the force and I will be waiting patiently for the disk streaming, while meanwhile using as it is. I would also love to be able to use a fair amount of timestreched stems. On my mpc I used none, always kept looped samples raw, due to the bad quality of the time stretch algorithm. So now I wonder that since I will change my use of the mpc/force cpu, if I will have trouble on using it the way that I intend to. I guess time will tell.
Not much I had six programs installed, five tracks with no more than 8 FX mainly filter types but also a pumper, phaser and reverb. Also one plugin using the Electric synth. I ran into problems in audio track record mode. I was grabbing an eight bar recording of my external synth and the MPC started glitching. Maybe the reverb was too much?
Thank you for the information you are providing. I am collecting info about the mpc one and akai force and I must say that on paper they look amazing but I suspected that there was something wrong as soon as I came to know that they are windows based. Researching on several forums I understood that they have several bugs, that akai is very late on its schedule and that the midi implementation is incomplete especially on midi in ports. Your precious posts exposed the poor specs design on top of that. My intent was to use the force for audio clip managing as yours.
Yea I wouldn’t trust the Force for too much audio loop launching ala Ableton live. The time stretching is not reliable either. For midi clips and simple one shots you’ll have no problems.
Sounds strange. Ive had more than that going without issues. But I mostly just record to clips instead of using the sampler in the menu. Might be a bug not present in the Force. I’ll try to make it suffer, and see if I can get it glitching.
Gave the force a bit of a spin after some time away from it. Connected the MC-101 to the inputs and sequenced the 4 tracks of the 101 with the force. Workflow is very fluid and smooth, very much enjoyed the brief time I had with the combo!
When the arranger mode drops, I think I will go all-in on the force for capturing ideas for the studio, add a 1TB SSD inside and start amassing a cache of material… Ive never used push with ableton so dunno if that is comparable to the lightning-fast track building I experience, but this feels good man!
Im now even contemplating of selling my MPC live and just sticking to the force… But never selling my elektrons, they offer a different workflow that cannot be replaced by any new Akai gear.
I may very well pickup a Force once disk streaming becomes reality, as I think it would become the best hardware for live stem remixing and performance.
But I doubt it would replace my OT, which is just so versatile.
Amazing how many different hats it can wear, and for now it’s good enough with long .wav stems from the CF card.
The funny thing is the more I use the pickup machines, the less I lean on having so many different long tracks in the static machines, and the more “live” and improvised I can be.
But I think together, Force + OT would be massive. The biggest trouble would be figuring out how to get both to fit in my carry-on approved hard case.
force + OT would be powerful indeed! You could run the 4 outs of the force into the OT for some mangling and resampler looping… hmm you could even use this to overcome the RAM limit by letting OT do the transition trick while you load up a new project on the force - interesting
I need to try this. Probably would have to use OT as sync master though for everything to work smoothly, but I reckon I wouldnt need to use the audio looper on the force in those cases anyway so totally doable.
It’s a testament to the OT’s capabilities that it can overcome other gear’s limitations by simply looping it while you make it do the thing it can’t do (yet)
I would imagine you could do a entire set in one project with two gigs of ram. Especially if you are working off programs with single drum hits and stabs. Paired with the OT you’ll get 128 sample slots if disk streaming plus an additional 128 of flex samples. That’s a ton of material to work with in just two boxes. All that sampling plus on board synths wow!!!
I totally could if such a large chunk wasn’t occupied by the OS.
I hear its more like 750MB RAM available for samples. Plus you have the 32bit up-scale.
Well that’s not very much in the way of 3-4 minute long stems.
I could certainly overcome it with some creative looping (OT) and shortening the stems for Force to manage. But then I’d have to rework a lot of things once the stream-from-disk update hits.
So I actually like the idea of working from different Force projects + OT a little more.
Actually I have no choice but to put the Akai as master. One of the main reason is the lack of mutitimbral functionality on the Akai. This is a problem because it will read any incoming midi massage and apply it to whatever track I happen to be on. For that reason alone the midi clock thing is irrelevant the MPC is always the top of the chain. Not a bad thing really.
