Support and discussion for all of Akai’s modern standalone MPCs including the MPC X / X SE, MPC Live 1, 2 & 3, MPC One / One+, MPC Key 37/61.
By horisonten Thu Feb 12, 2026 6:23 am
I'm migrating from an MPC Live to a Push 3 Standalone and would love some advice.

Exporting the midi from my sequences is easy enough. But I would like some good tips/pointers on how to migrate/recreate my drum tracks/programs in Ableton.

I do not really want to explode all drums to separate tracks/clips in Ableton. I would like to create a "drum program" in Ableton which I control through the same midi I have exported from my MPC.

I do not have the full Ableton terminology yet, but my guess is to create a Drum Rack and manually adding the same samples to the different slots in this drum rack. Is this the correct/best way currently?
By horisonten Thu Feb 12, 2026 12:16 pm
Elijah wrote:I haven’t tried it myself, but you might want to look into an app like Kit Maker. It should be able to convert XPM files into an Ableton Drum Rack, which could make the migration process much easier.

https://www.kit-maker.com/

Thanks for the suggestion. Seems to solve it.
But since the Push 3 Standalone came at a premium price, I would rather not throw more money also on the migration :lol:

I guess I'll just have to do it the manual way.
After further research it seems the easiest way is to create drum racks with multiple Simpler instances on each pad, to achieve the velocity layers.
By horisonten Thu Feb 12, 2026 4:33 pm
instanthouse wrote:This may help.
https://www.mossgrabers.de/Software/Con ... hMoss.html

Lots of videos to help

Thanks, also looks promising for a lot. But I can only see an option for Akai Keygroups there when looking at the video for the latest release.
I don't have any keygroups that needs converting unfortunately.

Edit: Or wait, are drum programs also .xpm format :hmmm:
By horisonten Fri Feb 13, 2026 12:12 pm
A final update for documentation purposes.

Recreating my drum tracks (programs) in Ableton was a breeze using Drum Racks with either one Simpler instance per pad, or a Drum Rack with a nested Instrument Rack per pad, and with multiple instances of Simpler in the Instrument Rack when recreating multi velocity layered drums.

It was actually quite fun to do it manually because it also helped a beginner in Ableton to start building that muscle memory.

Thanks for the suggestions in this thread.
I have now fully migrated from my MPC Live to Ableton and a Push 3 Standalone.

So long Akai...