Sub-forum for discussion about the DAWs and mobile apps that you use with your MPCs
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By astral_Signal Sun Jun 18, 2017 6:46 am
I've been producing my own music for roughly 10+ years. I started out using Propellerhead's Reason + ReCycle. The workflow involved was long and tedious, I would record samples in Pro Tools, import them into ReCycle to chop, load these chopped samples in Reason for sequencing, then when a track was finished I would re-wire Reason into Pro Tools for printing and finally mix-down.

Eventually I picked up an MPC 1000 and this completely changed this workflow for the better. I could do everything in the MPC, (record, chop, sequence) and it was the centerpiece of the studio. Overtime certain things started to annoy me:
- the OS (JJ OS1) was pretty old school albeit better than the official Akai OS
- the internal memory (maxed out out 128MB) is incredibly small
- the overall build quality of the unit is not great : buttons break or become unresponsive, pads become unresponsive
- the record metering window lacks vital numerical information, it's literally a graphical bar that represents input level
- 16bit/44.1kHz

So recently, I had been considering what life would be like without the MPC and relying entirely on my DAW (Pro Tools 12) for complete production (recording, chopping, sequencing, mixing). What tools could I use in Pro Tools that would allow me to achieve the same basics in workflow similar to an MPC? I use Beat Detective occasionally in Pro Tools, would this be useful for chopping? I'd also need a transient shaper as envelope editing is a crucial tool for me.

What do you guys think? Is it a wrong move, or is it a practical move?

Thanks.
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By tsindt Mon Sep 04, 2017 8:53 pm
This is interesting ...
I will go exactly the other way ... back to hardware (have buyed a mpc 1000 with JJOS2XL on it; damn good, but I have to learn and to experiment so much now).

But on my PC I have used Geist and Geist 2 from fxpansion for a whole bunch of productions. This software works nearly the same way, a mpc works, but with more possibilities and more convinience. So, if you want to produce right in the box ... I recomend Geist or Geist 2 for it. This software works standalone or as PlugIn in my DAW (reaper 5 by the way).