MPC5000 reviews, bug reports and fellow user support on the most recent standalone, hardware MPC from Akai
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By DJ ALX Wed Aug 11, 2021 7:08 pm
I need to render to individual audio tracks instead of tracking them to my DAW but it seems that i cannot do it .
Am i missing something?

I think i need to record everything in real time to either the HD recorder or the sample recorder but in pairs and not all 8 at once. Since its real time and not offline rendered Im thinking that the audio is recorded from an analog output stage? If this is the case am I going analog to be converted to digital again? Not sure If I can trust the AD convertors for tracking.

Any info about this will be appreaciated.

PS: I think im better off tracking in groups of 8, using midi clock sync.
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By DJ ALX Thu Aug 12, 2021 9:00 am
So I just recorded on HD recorder channels 1 and 2 and i see that if i select the channels to EDIT then i can export the whole thing. Im guessing and hoping that the HD recorder is sample accurate to the midi sequencer but I think the HD recorder can only record a song and not a sequence (I will find out soon). To avoid buffering from sequence to sequence I convert all my sequenced sequences into one big sequence. So I will try and put the big converted sequence with an added 8 bar filler as one sequence for the song to play. Hope this makes sense and that It wont lag (cos of buffering if any) upon REC+PLAY.

Anybody tried this?

I guess this is much more trouble tracking a 10 track song in 5 or more passes (if some tracks are stereo sources) rather than just midi clock syncing and transfering 8 audio tracks in one pass + 2 or more in a second pass.

PS: Doing it with midi sync there is a short msec delay of MPC5000 bar 9 in relation to my DAW's bar 9 but its constant and doesnt drift, so I can work with that. I can still edit slice copy paste on grid with no trouble (i think).
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By DJ ALX Thu Aug 12, 2021 1:53 pm
Ive conducted my experiments and made up my mind on how i should be doing this.
Im just posting this here for others to know.

Ive tracked out to DAW using midi clock in just one pass (will call this one SYNC) and by recording to HD recorder of the MPC5k in multiple passes and then exporting those tracks to wav files (will call this one EXPORT).

The EXPORT tracks are indeed on time and everything starts at BAR 9 sharp!
The SYNC tracks come in slightly later. The difference is about 35 msec later than EXPORT and about 38msec after the BAR 9 mark.

Image
Yellow is SYNC and Blue-ish is EXPORT

So seeing is believing right? Seems like the SYNC audio is drifting and the EXPORT audio is right on point, right?
I could just rest my case here but I needed to know how much SYNC drifts from EXPORTED or if they drift alltogether from my DAWs clock.
So I went to the last bar, bar 88 spliced it with my DAWs grid snap and compared each one with its own.

And I saw this :

Image

The SYNC audio might be 35-38msec late but its constent through out the whole 88 bars.
Which means I can rely on it and use my DAW grid to edit, copy-paste parts post tracking.
The EXPORT audio is the one that was drifting and it seems that the internal 85bpm runs a bit faster than my DAWs 85bpm, which means I cannot use my DAWs grid for post editing. Either its that or some kind of jittering or something of that nature that has to do with the audio recorder skipping samples during internal recording or something I do not know (or wont bother to find out).

Conclusion: Always track in sync with the clock you are going to use when you edit!

Id like to hear/read your thoughts and experiments (if any) on this.

PS: I dont know if imgur.com keeps the images forever or if I should upload anywhere else.