Akai Force Forum: Everything relating to the Akai Force, the new 64 pad, clip-based standalone sampler/groovebox from Akai. While not an MPC, it shares many similar software features to the MPC X/MPC Live including the same underlying code-base.
By Flint Blade Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:57 pm
Now I'm trying to export it onto a Thumb Drive instead of the SD card and the thumb drive shows up as "Read Only" (can't write to it) but the same thumb drive can be read/write on my computer.

Does every thumb drive need a special formatting to work with Akai?
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By MPC-Tutor Fri Jun 04, 2021 2:00 pm
exFAT works well, just stick with that. If in doubt, format the drive in the Force's file browser. BTW, it sounds like your SD card is corrupt or just poor quality. Try a different, good quality SD, class 10, Sandisk, Integral etc.

https://www.mpc-tutor.com/standalone-mpc-disk-options/
By Flint Blade Fri Jun 04, 2021 2:04 pm
Answered that question - the Thumb Drive works once I format it thru Akai.

Still this song export is going sloooooow as heck with the USB 3.0 thumb drive.

Would it export faster if I exported onto internal Force HD?

Everyone says to save all your files externally to avoid running out of space internal.
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By Koekepan Fri Jun 04, 2021 2:31 pm
I haven't tried this, because I'm trying to use the Force as its own mixing/mastering tool as far as possible.

That said, I wonder whether it's slow because it's individually calculating the stems with each export. This is bound to be a higher computational load than doing them all in parallel - but if it's calculating them altogether in one pass and then writing them all in parallel, that's a higher I/O load than just writing a single file. Bear in mind that most solid state systems do not have the same aggregate throughput that spinning discs have, even if they have lower latency.

Have you tried it on any small, low count testbed pieces? Does it write the files in serial or parallel? Have you found any ways of speeding it up by limiting track counts?
By Flint Blade Fri Jun 04, 2021 4:41 pm
Thanks for the helpful input... I'm working with an Arrangement that has 6 tracks - 5 of which are synth/drum plugins and 1 is an audio loop.
I recorded an arrangement hats about 4 minutes long.

When I go into "Export Arrange as Clips" it seems to be going through each track 1 at a time and exporting. Each time a track finishes, the overall progress bar goes up a few percent.

It seems to take just as long whether I'm exporting into a SD card, USB thumb, or even the internal HD storage.

It's been at it for about 2 hours already and its at 29%. I guess I'm just going to let it take all day to finish and then perhaps for the sake of comparison I'll try the same thing one track at a time.

Koekepan wrote:I haven't tried this, because I'm trying to use the Force as its own mixing/mastering tool as far as possible.

That said, I wonder whether it's slow because it's individually calculating the stems with each export. This is bound to be a higher computational load than doing them all in parallel - but if it's calculating them altogether in one pass and then writing them all in parallel, that's a higher I/O load than just writing a single file. Bear in mind that most solid state systems do not have the same aggregate throughput that spinning discs have, even if they have lower latency.

Have you tried it on any small, low count testbed pieces? Does it write the files in serial or parallel? Have you found any ways of speeding it up by limiting track counts?
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By Koekepan Fri Jun 04, 2021 8:45 pm
Wow, that is way too long.

If, as you say, it appears to be doing it track-by-track, that raises all sorts of questions about why any one track would take so long. Rendering a whole arrangement doesn't take that long.

If it's doing things that way, I/O can't really be the bottleneck. It must be doing something heinous with the CPU, but I can hardly guess what.

Contact Akai about it as a bug?
By DokBrown Fri Jun 04, 2021 10:49 pm
I do NOT have a FORCE, but I rec starting from scratch.


When my windows laptops start acting up, I do this B4 the laptop crashes & I lose precious work. I tend to do this every 2-3 years with windoze. This virtually never happens with my Ubuntu laptop.


1] load all your projects onto USB/SD
2] OEM RESET: reformat the HDD/install latest OS
3] if it works, put your projects back on
3] if that doesn’t work, send it back to AKAI for a new 1
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By Koekepan Fri Jun 04, 2021 11:10 pm
The Force, like the MPC series, is based on Linux, so the better comparison here is with Ubuntu rather than Windows.

I am genuinely curious as to what the cause is here, but I would sooner suspect defensive programming leading to inefficiencies than I would suspect a decay in the condition of the Force's basic software.
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By Lampdog Sat Jun 05, 2021 4:35 am
Flint Blade wrote:Now I'm trying to export it onto a Thumb Drive instead of the SD card and the thumb drive shows up as "Read Only" (can't write to it) but the same thumb drive can be read/write on my computer.

Thumb drive is using ntfs?
By DokBrown Mon Jun 07, 2021 3:45 pm
Lampdog wrote:
Flint Blade wrote:Now I'm trying to export it onto a Thumb Drive instead of the SD card and the thumb drive shows up as "Read Only" (can't write to it) but the same thumb drive can be read/write on my computer.

Thumb drive is using ntfs?



it’s a shame we are still fighting over formats/standards in 2020.
WAV vs AIFF vs FLAC
exfat vs ntfs vs ext4


besides proprietary real estate software, the main reason I keep windows 10 around is b/c of formats/standards. For example, my FIIO players do not like linux/ubuntu. The manual says they support ubuntu but I have had problems. Thus, I only use my windows desktop manage my ripped CD library.

https://www.fiio.com/x1ii_specifications
By frankie13 Fri Jun 11, 2021 1:35 pm
I had this issue once and it turned out that the arrangement defaulted to a length much longer than my actual arrangement. Check that you are only exporting up to the last bar of your arrangement and not beyond as it will render all that blank space and take forever.
By Flint Blade Tue Aug 03, 2021 3:00 am
frankie13 wrote:I had this issue once and it turned out that the arrangement defaulted to a length much longer than my actual arrangement. Check that you are only exporting up to the last bar of your arrangement and not beyond as it will render all that blank space and take forever.


THAT DID IT!
Thanks Frankie you're the man. I just checked this thread 2 months later to try it again... that was it all along.

the Arrangement was set to contain like 12600 bars of which I only recorded up to 109.
the Export function went along and did all 12600. wow.
Gotta set the arrangement to only contain the length used.

I guess I would have thought there would be a dialog or option in the Export window to prompt me to choose how long to export?