Yeah, it would be nice if people were more cognisant of the trade-off between frequent updates and overall stability. When it comes to musical instruments I’d prefer to be cautious though, and annoy middle management by taking a week to test that little update that ‘absolutely should be fine’…
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I know this… but have you seen a case of pre-announcing the release date that far out before?
First time I’d seen that, then a whole load of YouTubers posting about it in the run up.
I own a nice Elektron music making product, it has many known, unresolved bugs that haven’t been fixed… yet. Or maybe… yet?
But I’m such an enormously gifted, talented, incredibly skilled, and superior musician in my musicianship that I don’t need to tolerate such shoddy and inferior products - I use my vast musicianship wizardry to transcend these faults and literally morph and transmogrify them into a new dawn of musical greatness.
I feel sorry for those that are unable to do that.
The MPC Keys looks cool.
…it’s all about the look…anyways.
and now, i defenitly need my nap…for further updated beauty.
yeah, I agree entirely…
but at the end of the day, part of the job is risk/impact assessment.
however, as you rightly point out… now that we can so easily distribute new updates.
it’s easy to say the risk/impact is less because we can alway send out a ‘hot fix’ if there is an issue.
(if you want to see how true this is… look at how in frequently bootloaders are updated, rarely since they carry a real risk of bricking devices, unlike other firmware updates)
one interesting side of this is… which users get the negative impressions…
this comes back to Benn, he was a NEW user with a new firmware.
any bug he sees, he will kind of view as ‘having always existed’… and so ‘how can this be?’
however, with existing users it can feel very different…
if its a new bug in a firmware update, it feels less ‘fundamental’, and if the company is delivering regular updates - you’ll assume it’ll be fixed soon…
basically new users lack this ‘history’ and sense of progression , so bugs feel worst.
all that said, I think the most poignant thing Benn talked about, was how long it took Akai to deliver on the Force. in fairness, a radically different product for Akai - but still , not a good sign.
yeah, as a dev, I dont like to pre-announce dates - too much pressure on the team to meet, what is essentially, an artificial deadline.
that said, you’d have thought in this case, that would mean the update was also far along the testing cycle, and they were confident of release.
but again, you cannot really know the reasons, without being within the company.
again, thats why its important you have a good QA team, mistakes happen … we are all human - all you can expect, is that the team involved learn from the mistake, and put things in place to prevent them repeating.
going back the Keys, its a shame…
I’m really interested in the product, as Ive no real interest in pads, but the idea of MPC workflow etc is nice.
so I appreciated Benn’s video, as Id definitely wait for the Keys to mature a bit, and then perhaps look at it again.
OK, it was a dumb post. 
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But elektron doesn’t really have anything like this though right? Octatrack is really awesome, but far from a production environment, super complicated but also has real limitations, well I guess from being older. Also it kinda sounds like itself, or is easy to fall into a glitchy sound…
Analog rythm is mono… it is pretty much a non starter. They both have very limited tracks and resources. I don’t think you can really compare them, I love my elektron, they sound much better for sure, and have a fun workflow. Trying to control everything with one and putting together large arrangements sounds like a nightmare though. They are great at being just them with a couple other elements maybe, really not the same thing at all I think. I wish elektron had something similar.
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On a normal day it’s substantially more aggressive than this place is on a bad day, but yeah, pretty much.
Just to correct this, I believe he was a contractor who in a fluke retained rights to the firmware and that’s why he’s able to continue working on it. So never fired, just contract ended.
Still the point stands, AKAI is a business and businesses are gonna business.
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go buy one of these, and after that please send akai an email requesting a mini Force, and a sleeker mini mpc one, maybe call it something like the mpc 01 in the formfactor of the polyend tracker/Play…
and thank you for your support
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Cool, but that’s not a mpc keys…
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my bad , lol some people will say anything to get a Force mini
This isn’t the whole story here, it wasn’t in a fluke, AKAI just didn’t pay him for his work so he legally had the right to keep the IP. Doesn’t mean he was legally allowed to distribute his work though. But it seems AKAI has a pattern of not paying contractors, same thing happened with Roger Linn who is the real creator of the MPC line.
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They smoke too much weed and get to much cox there in Akai. If people will stop getting a positive results out of their modern Akai equipment - Akai will be ruined.
what would people do without Akai
Updates!
Also, now I know that Ave Mcree is a total hack and I need to block his channel. What a toolshed.
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There’s plenty of room in the tool shed for all the tools, even the dull and rusty ones. Give him a chance to redeem himself.
What did he do? Don’t really want to watch the video
I don’t get it.
He had this horrible experience with the MPC keys, and didn’t check with Akai if maybe his unit was faulty, but just assumed it was this bad and went ahead with his review?
Is that it?