Another surprising discovery was the very capable arpeggiator (it’s hidden under Note Repeat). I love how it lets you latch notes and play it independently, then if you create something you like, you can just hit Record to start playing the sequence and it automatically records in the player notes into the sequencer. Very neat!
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The workaround is to copy tracks to unused tracks and then copy them back in the order you want. This is the way it needed to be done on legacy machines as well. JJOS machines have track reordering as a feature.
It’s important to keep tracks organized and consistent per sequence if they are going to be chained in song mode.
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Very true, the various MPC related boards are littered with the corpses of track order related threads… to be fair to akai it’s not exactly a big ticket item, probably well under the radar at this point…
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I‘ve been waiting for the ability to erase the contents of a track on the fly while playback is running since like 1995, lol.
Akai would do well to have a closer look at those smaller ticket items!
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You can copy tracks easily to a destination track of choice (and delete the old one), so if you spend a little time it’s easy to reorganise tracks.
Programs are, unfortunately not easy to reorganize. What I sometimes do is save all programs to a folder, delete them from my project and load all the programs again in a specific order. They will appear in the order you loaded them in the mixer screen.
I will celebrate the day that you can just sort them with drag and drop 
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Haha that’s a proper long wait, akai do seem to have a fair degree of myopia when it comes to the small things, unfortunately we live in a world where the big bang’s sell and the details get missed sometimes, just look at this last update, the marketing team were in full voice about all the bells and whistles but all the low level improvements were almost ignored, like the drag and drop to pads and layers, and the fixed track mute behaviour etc…
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I don’t know if this is a bug or user error…
I change the project time sig to 5/4, insert 2 bars of 5/4 in front of the existing 4/4 bars. Delete the 4/4 bars and browse drum kits. When I load a kit, the MPC crashes and restarts.
Anyone wanna try that out?
I was loading acoustic snappy or snap kit. It’s near the top of the list.
It’s the first flaw I noticed just using the mpc software while waiting for my live…
Guess it just has to be worked around if looks like it won’t change…
Ricky Tinez has a similar problem.
I’ve had mine look like it’s hanging after saving samples a couple of times. But it saved ok, just didn’t clear the saving dialog.
so this happens when I change the time signature first THEN load a kit. the other way around is fine.
and when it crashes, it crashes back to the screen when you first power up.
Put in a report 
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I’ve never used an MPC before but recently i’ve become interested. Been reading a lot and watching videos and slowly getting my head around the workflow. The whole sequences, tracks, programs thing is a bit confusing though. I don’t suppose somebody could break it down for me in really basic terms? Also, I’m only interested in using the MPC live standalone - when doing this, how many tracks/programs/fx etc. can you use at once? Thanks
Imagine it like a DAW, sequences are the chunk of song you’re working on. Say you set a sequence to be 4 bars, or however many you want. It will loop and you record/overdub into it. Tracks are like tracks in a DAW. Individual instruments editable tracks. You can put fx on the track level just like a DAW. programs are basically instruments. You could build a drum program, load a group of drum samples and assign them where you want. You have 16 pads but you have up to 8 banks(8 pages of blank slots)to fill. The A B C D buttons at the top right change the page selected or you can double click them to access the other 4 pages. In a program you can edit each pad individually, amp envelopes, filters, 4 fx per pad and if it gets too CPU heavy you can instantly bounce your crafted sample down to the pad.
Your Home Screen shows what sequence is playing, what track you’re editing and what program is on that track. You could build a whole track on one sequence if you wanted but what you’d usually do is create a 4 bar sequence or something, then when you make what you like you can duplicate the sequence then edit the second one. Track/program settings are saved per sequence, your loaded samples and programs are stored like a sample pool. You could change the program order on every track or load a sample into multiple programs and edit/slice it in different ways assigned to different pads. You can rename everything and record most things into the sequencer, you can mix at the pad level, and the track level, put FX on the master, it’s got far more than enough FX lol
But anyway, the standard way to work with the MPC sequencer is just change the sequence while it’s playing and when it reaches the end of the current one the selected one will play. There’s also a page where you can do this with the pads rather than the Home Screen. If you want to sequence a whole song you can just set the order you want to play in song mode
hope that helps you wrap your head round it, it’s deep but it’s also easy
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Thanks a lot. Sounds very powerful.
A very simplified way of thinking of it would be to say that
- An MPC sequence corresponds to an Elektron pattern
- An MPC track corresponds to an Elektron track’s sequencer/step data
- An MPC Program corresponds to an Elektron track’s sound.
I believe a Program can be reused throughout different tracks and sequences though, so it’s not like the Elektron way, where each pattern is basically a completely standalone copy of all track sound and sequence settings.
A Program can be a drum/sample set (samples or the excellent drum synth), or a Plugin instrument (e.g. the Hype, Odyssey or Selena synth engine), or simply a midi track, sequencing external hardware. Then you also have pure audio tracks, i.e. a complete external recording, like a guitar track or something. My understanding is that audio tracks are limited to 8 tracks in a standalone project, whereas the other types of tracks (synth plug-ins, sample sets etc) are virtually unlimited. Though just like with any other DAW, you’ll likely run into RAM/CPU problems if you try to play 128 tracks simultaneously. 
Whats so cool about the MPC is that you can live record a number of automations right into each sequence on a per track, per program or even per pad level. You just hit a button, then start to jam out your performance live, and it will replay that every time that sequence plays back. So for example, if you want a filter to slowly open up in an intro part of a song, just duplicate a sequence you intend to use as the intro, name it “Intro”, and then hit the Automation button and start to twist some knobs or play with pad/track mutes. All of your actions are then saved and played back each time you play the “Intro” sequence. You can then chain a number of sequences into the full song and each section is playable as if you performed it live. Unhappy with one automation recording? Just record it again on top of the previous one and it will replace it.
I find this to be an ideal hybrid between building a surgically precise song in a DAW, and performing live every time you play back a song, like you do on e.g. the Digitone/Digitakt. The MPC gives you something in between, where you can still explore lots of fun in-the-moment transitions and effects, but without having to remember exactly how you achieved it the next time you load the project.
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So how are audio tracks used? What would be the benefit of using those rather than sampling the audio to a drum or keygroup program?
If you have a long stretch of audio, one benefit of an audio track is that it can pick up playback from any point. So if you have a full five minute audio track alongside some drum & MIDI sequences, you can just start halfway through or whatever and hear the full track. If you had a five minute sample that was being triggered at the start, you wouldn’t be able to do that.
Another benefit is you can copy and chop the content of an audio track around visually and nondestructively (the original sample will still be available). Copying parts of audio tracks can take you over the 5m track limit - if your starting track content is 3m long, it’ll only ever take up 3m even if you copy and paste parts of it into a fifteen minute collage. So audio tracks are useful if you like to work visually with large slabs of audio, but of course you can also assign long samples to pads or clip tracks, which allows for longer sample times and doesn’t use up any of the limited audio track pool.
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My MPCX has been in the box over a year now so it looks like Iv’e got some updating to do once I get it out again however I’m wondering now if you can now rename the Q-Links?
I did put a feature request in for this about a week after I bought the MPCX but don’t know if they added the feature at all. Would be handy if they could be renamed either on board or via the software.
Thanks
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