How many uncompressed audio tracks in Live / X ?

Hello everyone,

I'm a happy owner of an MPC One, and I plan to upgrade with a Live II or perhaps an X.
So I've read - about a year ago - that the MPC One can sequence up to 128 tracks like any other MPC, but it can only support up to eight *uncompressed* audio tracks (24bit/48Khz).
Higheraudio track count requires audio format compression.

I also heard that other MPCs were not that restricted; I THINK I remember the Live being able support up to 16 uncompressed track but I'm not sures. Don't know about the X.

So I checked the the Akai website, read the entire manual, searched for Youtube videos forums,, I can't find this info. Is there any fine member of this community who can help me out?
Thanks a lot!

8 audio track restriction is the same across all mpcs

Wow, thanks for the quick reply indeed!

I'm a bit floored. A beast like the MPC X cannot handle more than 8 audio tracks?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't an MPC 2000XL support 16 audio tracks in 16bit/44.1Khz?

Kei wrote:Wow, thanks for the quick reply indeed!

I'm a bit floored. A beast like the MPC X cannot handle more than 8 audio tracks?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't an MPC 2000XL support 16 audio tracks in 16bit/44.1Khz?

Sorry, I'll have to correct you The MPC200XL had no support for audio tracks at all.

All the current MPCs have the same internal board with same CPU and same memory except the MPC Key which has 4GB ram instead of 2GB.

You have to remember these are standalone devices, not full blown computers so there will be resource and feature limitations. If you need more then an MPC might not be the best solution for you. But in the world of standalone devices the MPC pretty much wipes the floor with everything else (at least in terms of features and power, but other devices might do certain things better than an MPC, it's all about the one with the workflow style that works for you).

Higheraudio track count requires audio format compression.

If you feed the MPC with uncompressed WAVE files then they will stay uncompressed WAVE files. What you've heard about "requiring audio format compression" is complete nonsense and a untrue.

Audio tracks are a nice bonus, but nothing prevents you from using the CLIP program and launch as many audio clips as the polyphony allows it, or put audio clips in a drum program. In fact, once an audio track is full recorded/processed it makes sense to bounce it and play it back as a clip in a CLIP program.

As for the MPC 2000XL, it had 32MegaBytes of RAM max IIRC, while the new MPC can hold up to 1 GIGAByte of samples, 3 GIGAbytes for the MPC Keys if I'm not mistaken. So the MPC 2000XL was clearly not made to playback long stems or serve as a multitrack recorder.

And is there a limit to the length of an audio track?

I don't know what the actual limit is on track kength but recording stops after 5 minutes. If you can split a track up into multiple takes it can be longer than five minutes.

LivePsy wrote:And is there a limit to the length of an audio track?

There is - audio gets converted to 32-bit in memory (for reasons unknown) so it will take a massive chunk of memory. With all the things playing (assuming no plugins) you would have around 1.7GB of memory to load a stem, but you can easily fill that up with a 44.1kHz/32-bit file.

Things are different on the Force as it got disk streaming, so you can launch as many long stems as the polyphony allows - this feature has been on the most requested list for the longest time but for some reason, only Force has it as of writing.

Bonsaipanda wrote:

LivePsy wrote:And is there a limit to the length of an audio track?

There is - audio gets converted to 32-bit in memory (for reasons unknown) so it will take a massive chunk of memory. With all the things playing (assuming no plugins) you would have around 1.7GB of memory to load a stem, but you can easily fill that up with a 44.1kHz/32-bit file.

Things are different on the Force as it got disk streaming, so you can launch as many long stems as the polyphony allows - this feature has been on the most requested list for the longest time but for some reason, only Force has it as of writing.

So it must all be loaded into 2 or 4GB ram, and there is a 5 minute limit as well. Thanks!