NAMM 2018 What To Expect..??

A Stability update is always welcome.. Yesterday I noticed that if I've got multiply automation going on in the same track in the same range on the timeline, it will skip a few automation points..
Anyway.. Appart from the stability (If it's even true at all) I'm rather dissapointed with this update..

Got a feeling that most of the features we are longing for won't see the day of light.. And that the MPC's will just function as advertised.. nothing more and nothing less..

When he started to talk about clip launching (again) I face palmed..

I'd be sorely disappointed if we don't get automation editing in Standalone mode.

And no, event list is not a decent way to handle them.

That video sucked. Andy hired that dude as a scape goat to escape hard questions and brass knuckles.

Its the way Akai always been, make a product, hype it, make promises only to sell it as is. I only came back because I thought they had changed their ways, the Ren software came a long way so I expected optimal performance from 2.0. But its like the MPC500 all over again. As usable that machine was, it was stepping on eggs to make beats. Sure you can make beats but you gotta do certain BS things so the bugs don't get you, and when the bugs get you, the whole project is down.

Most companies who go there pull out some big guns.
Elektron draws out a whole new synth.

What does Akai do? Present an expansion browser. Heh.
They're probably kind of close to calling the new MPC finished.
One would've thought they'd at least show a rough proto of automation lanes on standalone.
Then it'll be time to move on to the next new moneymaker.

It's noteworthy how for example Ableton doesn't go there, yet they're still thriving.

Fanu wrote:One would've thought they'd at least show a rough proto of automation lanes on standalone.

These are the sort of things that I expected to see..

The guy only had the Live with him.. I tend to believe they don't even have a big booth/stand..

Would you rather Akai introduce a whole new synth with many unfinished products released last year?
That’s what electron is doing.
Many ways of looking at it.
Either way it makes no difference to me. I’d point out the better marketing electron has and an obvious move to more economical boxes. Props they listened to their fan boys though, they been wanting that box for years.

Cockdiesel wrote:Would you rather Akai introduce a whole new synth with many unfinished products released last year?
That’s what electron is doing.
Many ways of looking at it.
Either way it makes no difference to me. I’d point out the better marketing electron has and an obvious move to more economical boxes. Props they listened to their fan boys though, they been wanting that box for years.

The way I see it is companies usually go there to market something new to cause a bit of hype, like Elektron, or to tell people something interesting about what's on the pipeline.
Or they do some cool stuff to raise interest…e.g., I see NI and UAD are presenting all kinds of nice content there (peep their Insta stories).

I'm not saying you can't go there and market a content browser, but not sure if that raises much interest. I'd much rather hear about serious improvements (automation on standalone, for example, would be something we haven't seen on that many touch screens yet). And I guess getting there ain't free, either.
But it's like I said before, my guess the MPCs are quite close to being finished in their book.

I gotcha. Yea, I wish there was more being shown too. I’m not going to speculate either way, and just hope for the best.

Only people who know are akai and thier wack marketing team. Lol

Wish it had tagged browsing in standalone.

So you can put your own expansions in now, that's good for me as a developer, I am very intrigued about how this is implemented. Are we able to install them with an XPN? Manually copy them to the 'expansions folder' on the internal drive via controller mode? Or are they stored on an attached drive?

But it doesn't look like 'filter by tag' or grouping has been added. He said 'you can easily search it via the browser', does that mean the search function now searches all expansions at once?

He seemed to go a bit shifty when pressed about other new features.

MPC-Tutor wrote:So you can put your own expansions in now, that's good for me as a developer, I am very intrigued about how this is implemented. Are we able to install them with an XPN? Manually copy them to the 'expansions folder' on the internal drive via controller mode? Or are they stored on an attached drive?

But it doesn't look like 'filter by tag' or grouping has been added. He said 'you can easily search it via the browser', does that mean the search function now searches all expansions at once?

He seemed to go a bit shifty when pressed about other new features.

I blew up the video on my 65 inch television. I tried to read browser location it showed untitled —- expansion—-expansion name.

So it seems they weren’t being loaded from the factory internal drive. You most likely have to install the expansion on the software and drag the .com folder to the Live and X. Dan gave those pusedo instructions when he said it was working months ago his unit.

MPC-Tutor wrote:He seemed to go a bit shifty when pressed about other new features.

I don’t think he’s got a clue what he’s talking about. I want to know what the ‘workflow enhancements’ are exactly, not just skimmed over in a sentence.

None of us expect game changing additions at this point, but we’d all love to see graphical editing of automation, proper GUI for effects, a well spec’d arpeggiator, PDC for the software etc.

Hopefully Akai still have a proper roadmap to develop the Live/X before they move onto something else...

I will take mackie control and expansions .xpn loading dile type and im good dor this update.. we can always have maschines updates..lol at least we have true hardware with unlimited potential

kaydigi wrote:I blew up the video on my 65 inch television. I tried to read browser location it showed untitled —- expansion—-expansion name.

So it seems they weren’t being loaded from the factory internal drive. You most likely have to install the expansion on the software and drag the .com folder to the Live and X. Dan gave those pusedo instructions when he said it was working months ago his unit.

Good spot.

Unfortunately like Fanu said, I actually believe they're closer to "finished" with these than we want them to be. Not being prepared for a major show like NAMM with anything other than expansion browser is telling. Ive never used an expansion, don't plan to, but I can understand why it's cool to have, and why you need to be able to browse them - I still think browsing sucks in general btw. The fact that it still doesn't remember what folder I was in when I go back one level, is annoying. Having to scroll all the way back down to where I was. Such a simple thing.

Everyone wanted this thing to work live on stage. Everyone wanted this thing to be a DAW. This is the result. A bloated piece of hardware stuck between computer and standalone, stuck between DAW, live on stage and music production. With no clear direction of which one it is. It looks great, but IMO the MPC is a confused platform at the moment. And I don't think they have the developer skill, nor strategic direction to figure out which direction to take it. The Akai folks from these past few years have confused this platform beyond recognition. It's not far from FUBAR. It's clear they don't have leadership in place to set and sustain a meaningful direction. And IMO that's what they need, soon.

I'd love to see them focus on the music production aspects of it - sequencer and software. Move clip launching and the XY thing to a scaled down form factor, sell it for $299 and let it run. There's no excuse for the 4000 sequencer and sampler to be more advanced than a platform like this. If I had to guess, they don't own the rights to the 4000 software. If they did, it'd be a no-brainer to cherry pick every feature from it, and it would have been part of the core feature set upon launch. Either way, I'm rambling. I keep my Akai frustrations to myself for the most part. Sorry for the mini-vent.

And FWIW, I think the Akai dudes in those videos are LIGHT YEARS better than Andy Mac and the other guy. Yeah they don't seem to know the MPC well yet. But I want to see how they do when Akai actually gives them something meaningful to say. Right now they're handcuffed trying to talk for 15 minutes with only 3 minutes of actual information to talk about.