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 larryd77 Mon Feb 27, 2023 6:48 pm
First post here. Greetings everyone.

In an effort to better understand how MPC handles sample rates, I ran some tests and found the following behavior (MPC One in standalone mode):

  1. Sampling audio into the MPC will record at 44.1k (at 16 or 24 bit based on a setting in Preferences).
  2. Bouncing audio within the MPC (e.g. flattening a pad with fx, bouncing a plugin to audio) will likewise always bounce to 44.1k.
  3. Importing wav files with higher sample rates (e.g. a guitar recorded at 32bit/192k on your computer) works. The MPC will retain the bit rate and sample rate of this file within the project! You can even slice/extract samples from the audio and it will retain the bit rate and sample rate for these slices. However if you bounce this audio, see #2 above.
The big question is how the MPC handles all of this during export. During export, you can choose up to 32bit/96k and the MPC seems to simply upsample or downsample to adhere to your request.

What I'm not sure of is if there is some intermediate step of converting to 44.1k, THEN to the requested sample rate??

For example, if I have a midi track for a plugin on the MPC (no bounced audio), or if I apply effects to the guitar sample from #3 above (also unbounced), then I choose to export at 32bit/96k, is it first flattening these to 44.1k before then upsampling to 96k?? or does it process direct to 96k?

My goal is to understand if I have the option to import my own higher quality wavs, work on a project on the MPC, then have MPC retain that higher quality during export (where possible).