Essential changes to Keygroups

Yes but all that great stuff you mention, there's maybe only a handful of people wanting to actually do that on solely an MPC these days. I love my Electrons, but I also recognise that they have carved out a very unique niche and I really don't think Akai could care less about them other than maybe 'kind of' poaching some ideas (but ignoring the really obvious stuff like all the intelligent hardware shortcuts and overall workflow ethos).

Genuine question, are there hardware samplers that are offering the kind of sampling features you need? If so, could you not just take that on the road and trigger it from your MPC?

MPC-Tutor wrote:Yes but all that great stuff you mention, there's maybe only a handful of people wanting to actually do that on solely an MPC these days. I love my Electrons, but I also recognise that they have carved out a very unique niche and I really don't think Akai could care less about them other than maybe 'kind of' poaching some ideas (but ignoring the really obvious stuff like all the intelligent hardware shortcuts and overall workflow ethos).

Genuine question, are there hardware samplers that are offering the kind of sampling features you need? If so, could you not just take that on the road and trigger it from your MPC?

Out of hardware I like Korg Triton / LE / TR range. I know it's synthesis engine and can do it what I want. Triton is the worst, because of floppy / USB emulators etc. Le uses outdated smart cards, but much better than floppys. TR uses last gen SD cards, so up to 1 GB is available and there are still plenty on used market. There is pretty usable way to convert MPC's key groups into KSF (Korg multisamples) - convertwithmoss.

Haven't used MODX / Montage, but it seems to be pretty capable. Though I'm sure importing key group to montage would involve jumping through hoops.

S5000 / Z8 - honestly seems like pretty good option. S5000 is less so, as its still SCSI era device. S6000 with usb seems better. Had some brief time with the machine, so cannot comment confidently. Z8 seems like pretty modern device. Not sure why the series died. Would love to try it one day. Not sure about conversion though

Alesis fusion. Seems like this one uses same OS/similar to MPC4000. Very capable, but converting is not straightforward. ExtremeSampleConverter should be able to convert

Surprise from SM PRO AUDIO. V-machine happened to be most capable of them all. I could load 4+ instances of Samplelord into the thing + FX. It responds to simple midi CC like 74, 71, 91 etc. The only problem I had was, it read only Kontakt libraries up to 3.5 , which is pretty ancient version. So I had to convert my library to SF2 or other "bank" format, which qualifies as jumping through hoops, but the machine and vst itself support FKIN DISK STREAMING IN 2009! So I could play any patch I could think of. I even was able to do many, many , many successful shows with this setup. Just midi keyboard/s + midi controller for mixer + v-machine and THAT's IT. Loved it. Still cannot replicate it's simplicity in 2023

indirect wrote:S5000 / Z8 - honestly seems like pretty good option. S5000 is less so, as its still SCSI era device. S6000 with usb seems better. Had some brief time with the machine, so cannot comment confidently. Z8 seems like pretty modern device. Not sure why the series died. Would love to try it one day. Not sure about conversion though

Both the 5000 and the 6000 can use the USB card, neither one came with it. The 6000 is basically just a fully loaded 5000, with some extra I/O and the removable faceplate. Other than that, you can turn a 5000 into a 6000 with the optional cards.

The Z4/Z8 sadly came out at the wrong place/wrong time. Those were around 2002 or so? Folks were moving in the box to Kontakt/EXS24/etc in droves, and those things just did not sell. They were pretty awesome spec-wise, native WAV file support (like the 5000/6000), built in USB, IDE connections for the drives, etc.. The sound was crystal clean though, so they weren't 'flavor' samplers or anything, the EMU's were probably the last bunch for that, but they made hardware sampling way easy.