Reviews and questions about the entry-level MPC500
By Jamon Sat Aug 22, 2009 1:50 am
My MPC500 is buggy. Others say theirs isn't. I want to know if mine is faulty, or if you're not finding the bugs. Please take a few minutes to follow these steps and see what happens:

Beat disappears

  1. Turn on MPC500
  2. MODE Record (by default says Mode: Stereo / Monitor: ON)
  3. DO IT
  4. Waiting input.. (make a sound)
  5. DO IT
  6. DO IT
  7. TRACK
  8. MODE PROGRAM
  9. Sample assign A1:L1 the new sample
  10. FULL LEVEL ON
  11. TRACK
  12. REC + PLAY START
  13. Tap pad A1 over and over until it loops
  14. OVER DUB (so it turns off record and just plays)
  15. MODE RECORD (beat is still playing in the background)
  16. DO IT (beat stops? it shouldn't)
  17. CANCEL
  18. TRACK
  19. PLAY START (nothing. where'd the beat go?)

When I do that, whatever I had playing is gone. Completely. I don't see notes in the step edit or anything. But, sometimes instead of the recording disappearing, the whole machine just goes unresponsive. I tried with and without 128MB RAM, same problem. If I switch up the events a little it doesn't do that, so follow the list exactly.
By Jamon Tue Aug 25, 2009 5:43 pm
I'm not crazy! Lots of people have given me a hard time for saying the MPC500 is unusable due to all the bugs. They say theirs is fine. Well I just got official confirmation for this one, which means the others were probably real too.

Thank you for this information. I have just gone through this test and this is defiantly happening. I will go through our records and if this has not been posted as a bug yet I will submit this bug to our engineers.


That's from Alesis.com support. It's the first time they responded sounding almost helpful. Usually they ignore me. Maybe they're changing?

Let's see if there's anymore firmware updates. Look for bugs and post steps to reproduce them.