Fabric XL for MPC has me torn

I am considering getting Fabric XL for my MPC to round out the selection of sounds. Piano, ep, organ, strings, guitar, etc… In theory it seems to be a great addition to my MPC, in practice I am not so sure. While most YouTubbers speak highly of it I have watched a few that quickly maxed the memory on their MPC and could not even add an effect. To my ears the dedicated piano and ep plugins sound much better than the Fabric XL instruments. So I am thinking, I can us it to compose on the MPC, then switch out the sounds later. The convenience of using only the MPC is nice. My other option is to continue what I am currently doing, attaching a MC-707 or Jupiter Xm to the MPC when I need those sounds. Better sounds and more sounds, but more gear and connections to deal with.

So my question to those who have purchased Fabric XL for their MPC’s, it is worth it? Do you find that you use it and you are glad you got it, or do you wish you had avoided that purchase and put your money somewhere else? Do you frequently run out of memory when using it, or is it a good source for those extra sounds you sometimes need? There are a lot of smart, experienced people here and I do value your opinion.

“Fabric XL” is a little bit of a misnomer since you don’t have to use the more memory-intensive XL version. it comes with just plain Fabric, and i’m not sure what the difference is honestly. all the presets are the same AFAICT. i don’t use a lot of plugins but never really run into memory issues with Fabric, though of all the plugins it does have a noticeable lag when scrolling between presets. Once you’ve selected the preset, it seems to play normally.

As an all-purpose plugin with acoustic pianos and string samples, Fabric is fine. I have Stage Piano too but don’t have a strong preference for one’s pianos over the other. I guess Stage Piano gives you more control over tweaking a given preset’s parameters but also haven’t dived deeply enough into either to compare.

2 Likes

100% worth it.