MPC X, MPC Live, MPC One & MPC Key 61 Forum: Support and discussion for the MPC X, MPC Live, MPC Live II, MPC One & MPC Key 61; Akai's current generation of standalone MPCs.
By Jawbrizza Wed May 04, 2022 7:59 am
HanHuman wrote:
MPC-Tutor wrote:One way is to join all your kit's samples in a single WAV file. Then in the MPC slice it non destructively and you can then access the slices on each pad layer using the 'Slice' parameter. So for example, a kit that uses 64 samples would now only need a single WAV sample, hence only one sample would show in the loaded file list. You could make your 'stacked' samples either in a computer audio editor or in an MPC sequence with all your individual samples triggered from successive events (use 'bounce to sample' to create the stacked WAV). After creating your stacks purge all the unneeded samples and just keep the stacks. Chop them using 'region chopping' (if your events were equally spaced) or threshold chopping.

Hey Tutor
Single WAV files and non destructive chops seem like the way to go yea. With the bounce to sample feature and region chopping it shouldn't take so long indeed.
Thanks for the tip!


if you have a computer there’s a free software that does this for you called octachainer. It’s for octatrack so it will output a wav file and an OT file which contains the slice data for octatracks. You could just ignore the ot file and use the wav. Saves you messing around in an audio editor as it’s evenly spaced for you. Can import whole folders. And auto normalise, export in 16/24 bit etc.
Also if you have an iPad or iPhone there’s a great app called sample crate. It allows you to quickly organise kits and also has the sample chain export feature. It’s like £2.50 iirc. Will save you tons of time
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By HanHuman Wed May 04, 2022 11:10 pm
Jawbrizza wrote:if you have a computer there’s a free software that does this for you called octachainer. It’s for octatrack so it will output a wav file and an OT file which contains the slice data for octatracks. You could just ignore the ot file and use the wav. Saves you messing around in an audio editor as it’s evenly spaced for you. Can import whole folders. And auto normalise, export in 16/24 bit etc.
Also if you have an iPad or iPhone there’s a great app called sample crate. It allows you to quickly organise kits and also has the sample chain export feature. It’s like £2.50 iirc. Will save you tons of time

Nice, octachainer seems like the perfect tool to do just that. Thanks!
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By MPC-Tutor Sat Nov 26, 2022 4:16 pm
Just bumping this again as I've been investigating further and have found a very practical use for this beyond just making your sample list more manageable.

With recent firmware releases, loading programs has become progressively slower, especially in the Force, and it turns out that the bottleneck is not the file size of the samples used, but the number of samples in the program.

For small kits/instruments you'll probably not notice, but with heavy stuff with hundreds of samples, e.g. multi-velocity multisampled programs, it's a real issue. It seems the browser performs some processing for each sample that must be loaded, with the Force clearly taking much longer per sample (maybe disk streaming related).

I've been working on a new acoustic kit which features up to 12 velocities per articulation. The original kit, contained 32 drum and percussion articulations, for a total of 276 individual samples. The entire kit was 190MB total size. It uses simultaneous play to may the velocities across multiple pads.

I measured the loading time for this kit from the same SD card and got the following:

MPC: 15.5s
Force: 52s (not a typo, that's fifty two seconds).

(Yes, the force took more than three times longer to load this kit - not just this kit, any kit BTW, it's just that these extreme kits really highlight the issue). But even 15.5 seconds on the MPC is really long.

So, I decided to make a 'chain' version of the kit. Here each articulation just uses a single wav file, which is a 'chain' containing all the different velocities for that one articulation. This is then sliced non-destructively and the layers in the kit just reference the appropriate slice from that chain.

So, the new version of the kit only uses 32 actual wav samples ('chains') instead of 276 individual drum samples. Total file size of the kit is still the same, 190MB. Here's the new load times:

MPC: 3.5s
Force: 12.5s

So using chains means the same size kit loads more than 4 times faster in MPC and Force. Plus we have the added advantage of a 'tidy' folder/project window containing only 32 samples instead of a long bloated list.

Still testing this to make sure there's no performance hit when using so many non destructive slices, but it should be fine. It's obviously a pain in the ass to set it all up, I used an audio editor to splice it all together.

But I think I'll be using this for the final release (likely include the non-chained version as well, just for those who want the individual samples to work with). But for those who just want a quick loading multisampled kit, this is a fantastic solution.

Would like to do the same for my 8 velocity instruments, but these use sustain looped samples so the set up is much more complex as I would have to set up everything via pad parameters (including the loops). But for one shots this works really well.

BTW, let's not forget that no matter what method you use, the Force is still taking three times longer to load any type of sample program and Akai really need to address this. It's pretty pointless having super-speedy SSDs if the browser is causing these kind of bottlenecks. I also suspect that this may eventually find its way into the MPC browser, especially if it gets the disk streaming update.
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By HanHuman Mon Nov 28, 2022 2:28 am
Another good reason to make non destructive programs. Would be great if some app could take some chopped up programs, merge all the wav files AND convert it into a non destructive program. :nod: And then have a queue list of all the programs from a folder so you can convert them all in one go. :lol: :worthy:
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By EnochLight Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:15 pm
MPC-Tutor wrote:BTW, let's not forget that no matter what method you use, the Force is still taking three times longer to load any type of sample program and Akai really need to address this. It's pretty pointless having super-speedy SSDs if the browser is causing these kind of bottlenecks. I also suspect that this may eventually find its way into the MPC browser, especially if it gets the disk streaming update.


Have you tried turning off disk-streaming on Force and then load your kit to see if it's more in alignment with the MPC currently? :hmmm:
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By EnochLight Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:50 pm
MPC-Tutor wrote:
EnochLight wrote:Have you tried turning off disk-streaming on Force and then load your kit to see if it's more in alignment with the MPC currently? :hmmm:


Yes, load times are the same regardless if disk streaming is on or off.


Good to know!
By HouseWithoutMouse Thu Feb 08, 2024 7:42 pm
I've tried this and load times are improved immensely. A certain Rhodes sample set I converted from Kontakt and reduced to Akai limits in Ableton, 165 megabytes, 418 wavs, takes over 60 seconds to load on my Force 3.2.3. But when all the samples are chained in one WAV, it loads in 4 seconds. Boom!

One question. Is there any downside to using Pad Parameters for everything in keygroup programs? I'm converting everything to SliceIndex 129 in the chained programs, and I haven't noticed any ill effects so far.
By wowzers Sat Feb 10, 2024 6:03 pm
That's interesting! These endless list of Keygroup Samples for Instruments with 4 Vel Layers from c1-c6 drives me crazy. But if i understand you correct when i sample my VST Libraries in one Single Wav i have to chop it manually and assign it manually? No Autosampler, right?
By HouseWithoutMouse Mon Feb 12, 2024 5:42 pm
wowzers wrote:So which software did you use for the chained Samples to see it as a Keygroup Program on the MPC?


I think I misunderstood your question. The program doesn't create a keygroup program from just a sample chain, it takes an existing keygroup program, merges all audio together and re-maps all slices to point to the new location in the big WAV file.