Yo!
Okay, I just narrowed down what’s causing the gratuitous overwriting of my project files, and figured out why it might not be affecting some of you: i.e. it seems to be a direct result of saving/resaving a program before resaving the project, regardless of whether or not any changes have been made to that program or the project itself. And it will happen, repeatedly, even without rebooting the MPC or reloading the project, as long as you have saved/resaved a program first.
In other words, if/when you save/resave any program within a project, even if no changes have been made to that program, and you then resave the project, the MPC will proceed to overwrite all the samples in the project folder, even if no changes have been made at the project level. It’s also worth noting that there seems to be no way to resave a program either, without the MPC overwriting all the samples in the program folder; and again, this happens every time, even if no changes have been made to that program. In both cases, the result is that the files in the program/project folders gradually become more and more degraded with every save.
If any of you, kind folks, would like to confirm this on your MPC’s, I would be much obliged.
At any rate, I’ve now spoken on the phone with a tech at Akai (who was very helpful, by the way), and he agreed, pending some tests of his own, that this behaviour is not optimal, and that it very likely could result in cumulative file corruption, as I’ve experienced. So, assuming that this is not just a problem with my MPC (which doesn’t seem to be the case), sufficed to say, this affects all of us significantly. It’s definitely something to be aware of, at very least, if you don’t want your samples degrading over time.
We may actually be getting somewhere here… (fingers crossed).
Cheers!