SP-FORUMS

I had heard nothing but bad news about this sampler but not all is bad.

First the pads are outstanding. This is my first Akai and I see why people like Akai, they do make the best pads. Very tight and very accurate.

The operating system is about as simple as it gets, everything is pretty much laid out on the surface and their are really no hidden menus.

I loaded a test loop on a card and had no problem playing it. It was tight and the sounded fine. It looped correctly also. My next test is to record a click track wav and see if what I have heard others say that it goes out of sync.

The only bad I can say so far is, the manual really doesn't tell you enough and you have to search out on the web for more info on how to use it.
There is no initializing , and setting up a blank kit to use as a template is a lil laborous.
And the one major glitch I had is that I made a blank kit but it wasn't blank. There was this saw sound on pad 3 even though it said the pad was empty. I turned off and back on and the saw sound moved to pad 1...weird.

So overall not to bad, I do see the problem with loading sounds, as you load a kit, it will sit there and load each wav file. SO my plan is to use this as a portable looper but I will have to plan out my set to cover that long load time. The other thing I noticed is that it seems to be very limited via midi.

I will report back in a few days after I give it some more testing.

yo . so does this sample in the conventional manner . from input source?

can you tweak sounds .. and if so .. how easy?

It will sample and you can adjust the start/end points and you can play with the filter but I noticed distortion in the filters plus the bad thing is the endless encoders of the knobs, I prefer they have a stop point or be a lil more course.

I haven't tested the sampling though but its supposed to sample.

But I cannot say enough about the pads and their playabilty. Really good.
The sample managment though is less to be desired. Example if I load a sample in lets say all 16 pads, it doesn't copy the sample it loads the sample. So if a sample takes 15 seconds to load on a pad then it will take 15 secs x 16 pads to load.

However it does loop a pad like I have been wanting. So I only see this a sample player. Not much in a performance tool other than firing samples off the pads. Add a usb battery pack and its portable.

Ok upon further investigation, the sample management goes like this. You load your sounds to a card, 16bit 8 character names wav files no larger than 48 megs. You select card and then load the sounds in one by one, then assign to a kit which is then saved to the card. Its kind of a pita because you need to make a template kit for saving kits to the card otherwise you have to go through each sample and set up its settings. But not a game killer. The weird glitch noise is also gone but I am wondering if its because I formatted the card again.

I hooked the Korg electribe 2 midi out to the midi in. But had no success in getting anything to work with midi. This is fine, I mean the sp808 sucks at midi too, so I was planning on just firing loops realtime anyhow.

This will work for what I want, but man I see soo much potential they could have put into this.Like time stretching samples to incoming midi clock would be sweet. Also I paid $152 off ebay and I feel I paid about $50 too much considering its faults. Oh well I will play with some more, see if I can squeeze a lil gold from this lemon.

so .. technically speaking .. its a good way of storing all your drums.. trigger pad . shame they didnt add loop - where you could create a sequence like the kaossilator . would have sold it for me

I was gonna cop this but few things kept me away like lack of pitch. I guess its great for triggering samples into a multitrack, I used to make beats that way. You can sample into this model, the MPX8 is the one you have to load up samples to. Other than that, there are better samplers if you save up more.

true indeed . mpc500 .. possible second hand bargain

THEGREAT wrote:true indeed . mpc500 .. possible second hand bargain

Wanted to love the 500 but menu diving and learning curve eventually got me. Not saying it’s hard, I’m sure it’s not, just didn’t have the time to invest.

crucial . i guess reverting to menu diving after the work flow of an sp will leave a bit to be desired