I agree if that’s what happened, as in it was a plan, but nobody knows that and never will. I was under the impression they where under selling it before tbh, and thought it too good to be true. Turns out the price wasn’t to hold. 
but further than that it’s best to jus let it go imo rather than get down over money.
what’s the point in cutting your nose off to spite your face? : )
Wow you really partying with your pals!200€ on a weekend…I prefer to spend these 200 on a weekend in a nice hotel near by the sea in Paxi with my wife 
It was just an analogy that came to mind, 
Tbh I don’t get time at all to party these days, bar a couple of festivals. Tho 200 on a weekend for anything is surely standard … in fact you’d probably spend much more out with your partner, I wasn’t including food… 
I wouldn’t sacrifice time with my Mrs and daughter for all the new gear in the world tho 
No, i can afford it but i agree with Yorgos on this =)
Sorry for you dood : ( Hopefully they drop the price again or you manage to save a little more towards one down the line.
Now it’s all cleared up tho and we’re all totally fully aware of the mundane details of how much things cost, i hope we can Get the thread back on a “music making vibe” for those that are still interested in this dope product… 
So I checked and the shop I preordered from in Berlin will honour the original price.
Just got a text my preordered MPC is ready fro delivery in Copenhagen today.
I just picked up my MCP live in Copenhagen, i got it at the Pre-order price 980 Euros.
EDT added pic to compare size with Elketron box standard…its f…ing huuuuge
Imagine the X! Congrat and have fun.
Proper velocity sensitive pads FTW!
Ok, I’ve had a few more hours to play around with my Live. I love it more every time I use it. It’s so easy and effortless to get things going, and it sounds and feels great. I haven’t had any bugs or problems of any kind, but I have noticed quite a few little touches that are really nice. I love how it switches from REC mode to OVERDUB automatically. Everything can be done without stopping the track. I haven’t had to take more than 2-3 seconds to do anything so far other than sampling/sample editing.
Definitely my favorite thing about the Live is that you can do any type of workflow on it (within reason, of course). I effortlessly switch between different workflows depending on the type of track I’m working with. MIDI tracks are an absolute dream to work with, the piano roll is fantastic and once you get the hang of combining the knob with the touchscreen it’s very fast, and drum kits are very deep and versatile in the ways that you can work with them.
Overall, I feel incredibly spoiled and am pretty much jealous of myself. If only the old me from 10 years ago could have had this instrument, haha! I think the Live is really what I’d hoped for all these years. I can do looping ambient sessions with my hardware synths, layer long field recordings, create dance tracks quickly and easily with any combination of hardware, software, and sampled sounds…it pretty much does all of my favorite things from my old MPC 2000, Fxpansion Guru, Ableton Live’s drum rack and piano roll, as well as many many features that I’ll only use occasionally or will have to grow into.
I think the big surprise for me was how useable the XY control actually turned out to be. I’d say that it’s a bit limited in options, but for live performance of dance music, there are a few really nice things in there that are actually useable. I’ve always thought Kaoss pads sounded like garbage and was never impressed by them, so I had 0 excitement about the XY control mode. I hope this feature gets expanded in the future with some more interesting effects combinations, but for now it does all the necessary things and sounds pretty good.
I’m starting to really wonder how my soon-to-come Digitakt is going to make itself useful next to my Live. I must have been really underestimating the Live in my mind for the last few months because I’ve been expecting Akai to drop the ball and they simply haven’t. This thing is great!
My buddy came over and played around with it and without any help, he figured out how to make some loops on it, sample, loop, etc. in about 15 minutes. I wouldn’t say it’s intuitive, but not that far off, either.
I think a lot of people are hanging back on this one, waiting to play with one in person before deciding what to do. If you are one of the first people you know to get a Live, you WILL have a long list of sudden text messages/skype messages etc. asking to hang out soon. “It’s been too long!” they’ll say. But it won’t be 5 minutes of small talk before they “notice” your MPC sitting there, and ask to check it out, haha!
EDIT: I forgot to mention another “little” thing that I LOVE. You have a little battery/cpu/RAM monitor that pops up if you click on the battery icon. It’s just a very straightforward little pop up window with 3 pieces of info, but it’s very nice and exactly like you’d have on a computer UI. So far, I’ve never even come CLOSE to getting the CPU up over 25%. Also, my battery lasted over 6 hours on the first charge, so I’m very happy and impressed with that.
Way to blow any doubts I had out the water! Can’t wait to get mine (presuming they don’t stiff me with the price)
Sounds promising.
Is there something that you don’t like?
Well, it’s too early to say I know the instrument really well yet but nothing major so far. I’m hoping that there’s a faster way to select all the notes on the piano roll than simply being forced to use the selection tool and dragging a box around all the notes. If you have a complex MIDI track going with notes on more than 2 octaves, it becomes a little annoying to try to select them all quickly.
I haven’t looked into any shortcuts, etc. so perhaps there is a quick way to “select all” in the piano roll like ctrl + A on pc or the equivalent on mac (can’t remember), but that’s my only complaint so far.
Mostly the things that bother me are tiny little things that are simply a matter of learning a new interface. I have to keep reminding myself not to bother double-clicking on the drop-down menus via the touchscreen because it’s generally better to just use the data dial (big knob) to scroll through menus quickly instead.
So basically, we’re talking about very small things that don’t really matter much. As I learn to write full tracks on the Live, I’m sure I’ll notice some things I don’t like, but nothing important so far.
Should be nice if they do a double tap = menu (with select all … etc)
Thanks for all the valuable info !
How about limitations when used in standalone mode ? Did you try it and if so, did you notice anything that was missing ?
The Akai support page mentions that the ‘main’ difference is the lack of VST support for obvious reasons, but what about the rest ? I read timestreching algos might not all be available, and I know you can only have 8 audio tracks but thats about it…
Yes, something like that is important for workflow efficiency. I’d also love to see a way to shift MIDI notes (and samples, I suppose) up and down an octave at a time by holding shift + moving the data dial or something like that. Moving in semitones is a little slow when you just want to double a bassline up/down an octave quickly.
That said, for all I know there are already shortcuts and I just don’t know what they are yet. I’ll try some combos later and let you guys know if I find any that work.
I want to ask about the time stretching in standalone. If you have the time to test it and share with us that will be great.
Thank you for the info!
I’m glad you mentioned standalone mode. My only computer runs windows 7, so I have no idea what anything BUT standalone mode is like, haha! I wanted the MPC as a standalone unit in the first place, so the only time I’ll be using controller mode is to swap tracks into Ableton Live for mixdowns. I’ll probably also do some of the timestretching via controller mode too, since the best algorithms don’t run in standalone mode for some reason (that was a big, not good surprise when I found out).
That said, I’ve done some timestretching in standalone mode and its still the best I’ve ever heard out of ANY piece of hardware (including octatrack). I moved a track down to 30 bpm and then all the way up to 300 bpm with one of the demo tracks and the samples were still useable. In Ableton Live if I timestretch anything beyond about 5 bpm it starts to sound like garbage, so for me the MPC is a big step up in quality even in standalone mode. Vocals take a hit more than other types of samples, but the artifacts are so minimal that I’m really quite happy with it so far.
I’m still in the midst of moving to another state/city. Once I’m done moving I’ll get another computer with windows 10 on it and try controller mode, but a lot of my old vsts won’t run on 64 bit systems, so until I’m done bouncing all my old tracks down to audio stems, I’m going to stay with windows 7 on my main comp.
I wanted to see how far a person could go in standalone mode, and I’m very encouraged so far. It seems that I’ll be able to go all the way up to (but not including) mixdown right on the MPC itself. That’s all I ever wanted. It would be nice to have 8 tracks instead of 6, or be able to break some of the channels into mono and get more tracks as a result (4 mono tracks and 4 stereo tracks would have been spot-on imo), but most people bounce down to 6 stereo stems for mixing and mastering these days anyway, so I feel like it’s still possible to do full tracks on the MPC in standalone.
Have you tried to compare it with Live’s complex Pro algo?
