You bring up a very important point and something that many find a detriment when first diving into the Force. There is so much, and often multiple avenues or ways of doing things and reaching a goal that it can turn people off.
The new MPC’s still follow a basic ‘MPC’ workflow that feels familiar to users. The Force isn’t that (although it can still do all the basic MPC-like stuff). It’s really it’s own new thing, different than Ableton, different than the MPC.
I see that as a good thing and offering the flexibility to forge your own style or way of working, producing, and performing. But you will be experimenting and often going at it alone.
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I’m willing wager it went up because of shipping/supply shortages, which is a total bogus move by US retailers forced to do so from the shipping industry (which is making record profits). I doubt Akai are affected by the chip shortage, unless their SoC’s are actually made by TSMC and/or Samsung? One would hope they already bought a warehouse full of those instead of having them made “on-demand”.
I wonder if the MPC Live II (and MPC One) price will be going up soon… Place your bets!
I’ve asked in the Mpc thread but so far no reply. But this is the same issue I had when I owned a Force, so I’ll ask here. Going to email Akai too.
If I automate Hype’s Osc Selection the Mpc is prone to crashing. Has anyone else experienced this? More specifically if I’m automating said Osc Selection, and automating other Hype parameters the crash happens more regularly than if I’m just automating that one particular parameter. But it’s definitely that particular parameter that seems to caused the issue.
And I’m simply talking about 1 instance of Hype, with a Drum programme.
Seems these machines can’t cope with anything more taxing than their basic functions.
I havent tried this in a long time. I noticed crashing when automating the wavetables. But it worked on the first couple of firmwares. They did try to limit this with making it slower to change that parameter.
I kind of just let it go, as i seldom use the internal synths anyway.
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Ok thanks, so it’s a known issue.
The reason I wanted to automate the Osc was to make it sound a bit more exciting and dynamic. I’m not massively keen on the internal synths myself, so trying to make the most of them. I do like the fact that I can get the internal synths to balance well within the Mpc environment.
Might need to get into the habit of resampling or bouncing to audio, to thwart the crashes before they happen.
Cheers!
Yeah. I liked the hard crunchy wavetable action i got when i automated the change of wavetables, not just scrolling through the different waves in a table.
I’ll try to do a test when im in the studio, and see if it still is an issue. If it is i’ll send in an bug report to Akai.
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If you post a simple song file with the automation recorded that causes this crash, I’d be happy to try it on mine (I own both MPC Live II as well as Force). I can’t get Hype to crash on either.
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Hype is the only thing that’s crashed for me, and that was on an MPC One. I don’t recall what I had it doing, but certainly nothing obviously taxing. It only happened once but that was enough that I’m now cautious when it comes to Hype. The other onboard synths I’ve automated in various ways without any trouble (so far, at least). My gut feeling is that Hype is the issue, but I don’t really have any hard evidence for that.
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How do I do that, lol!
Going to experiment tonight, automating the other synths, and I’ll see what happens.
Uhhhh… create the song Project, add the automation - and save the Project. Run it afterwards to see if the crash happens - if it does - then that’s the song file (the one you saved prior) that you should post. You can use any free file sharing service to post the Project file (DropBox, WeTransfer, etc)
How is the force at catching perfect loops? Does it use that looper page that’s on mpc one? Like is it easy and fast to catch loops and get them chopped/playing on the go? I didn’t really love the one but thinking of pairing a force with an old MPC using force as a central arranger, so would be catching loops from iPad/mpc/itb plugins. Don’t know if I should just bite the bullet on an OT again. It’s the disk streaming and comprehensive arranger that catches my attention but being able to chop to tons of pads standalone might be able to make my launchpad redundant too
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It’s seamless, pretty much easy. Clips are just snippets of audio recorded as perfect loops. They can be as short or as long as you want them to be (1 bar to 999 bars).
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I mean, that’s certainly an option. It has the exact same Looper page as the MPC line. But I prefer to record my loops as Clips from the Matrix page.
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Yes.
Oh got it nice I wasn’t sure if it used the looper thing to record into clips good to hear it can do it direct from the matrix. Any major annoyances with the force? I really like that the pads are detachable from the screen functions that’s something that pissed me off about maschine. It looks pretty tempting. Also does it struggle when multitracking things from an external interface? Not sure if you’ve tried that
on the Force is it possible to do that looper work around that’s done on the Mpc where you arm the pads you want to record your loops into before hand so that you can can loop, record and assign into the pads, and play the loops without stopping the sequencer?
bumping, also does anyone know if disk streaming is for audio tracks only or can you do like velocity layered auto sampling for big key groups etc? Where is the best place to discuss the force? Everywhere seems dead about it but it looks pretty crazy from videos. It seems like the online community around it is pretty quiet
There’s a Facebook group which is fairly active and there’s a sub Reddit that doesn’t quite have enough activity yet (but more the merrier).
Once you’ve loaded a keygroup you can mark individual samples to be streamed but I couldn’t see a way to mark a whole group at once. For big keygroups it would take a lot of tapping. If there’s a better way I haven’t found it yet (would love to be enlightened).
So, I think it’s important to differentiate between the way Force handles live looping and MPC handles live looping. MPC isn’t Clip-based, so its separate Looper is really the only way to - well - do any sort live audio recorded “overdub looping”. On Force, you have that optional Looper just like on MPC, but Force’s Clip-based/loop-based workflow lends itself better to actually using the Clips to build your loops live - in sync while the main sequencer plays. That said, each Clip does occupy an audio track, but you can have a pretty much unlimited amount of Clips playing (one at a time) on each of the 8 audio tracks. Each row of Clips allows you to play up to 8 audio Clips at once (again, think of a Launch “row” as a single “Sequence” on the MPC), as well as a virtually unlimited amount of Keygroups and Drum Programs, as well as up to 8 of Force’s virtual instrument plugins. All of this occurs on a launch “Row” (the horizontal plane of Force). Think of the vertical plane of Force as a single “track” column, where you can have an unlimited assortment of single audio Clip recordings or “multitracked looped” MIDI-triggered data (Keygroups or Drum Programs).
But to address your original question - you can continue main sequencer playback and assign loops overdubbed in the Looper during playback - in sync - but they are exported to a Clip. The easier and less cumbersome way to do it is to just record your “loops” as Clips on the Clip matrix, IMHO, and treat your “overdubs” as a single horizontal row. That gives you 8 “live audio” overdub takes, 8 “virtual plugin” overdub takes, and a virtually unlimited amount of Keygroup and Drum Program takes (assuming your disc-streaming can keep up with your Project).
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this was the work around I was referring to, wondering if this can be replicated?
Right, and what I’m trying to say (sorry my previous post was a little convoluted) is that Force actually has this sort of workflow by default - they’re just Clips in the Matrix. There’s no need to use the old Looper like that (unless you want to do actual overdubs for a single Clip, which that video doesn’t show). What that video shows is a clunky workaround for MPC-users to do “Force-like Clip-based” recording. Ironically, that video came out later the same year Force came out.
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