Glad to see this thread already running. I've had a MPC Live for two years, and just got my Force about two and a half weeks back. The 3.1 update piqued my interest. I have to say I am totally in love with the Force - the clip- and arrange-based workflow works so much better for me than MPC sequences.
I am 15 pages from the end of the manual and have been keeping a list of wishlist items together as I've used the device and things have occurred to me. I heard that Akai pays more attention to these forums than their own ticket queue, so I hope they see these.
1. Configure MUTE button behavior on a track so that it can either be audio mute or MIDI/event muteI like the way that pad mute works on the MPC (I think in Track Mute?) by muting the midi notes and not the audio at the mixer, since this allows you to hear the tails of pads that were played before you muted, and prevents you from hearing the tails of pads that you are unmuting. It would be nice to be able to configure this option in the Force based on how you want MUTEs to behave.
2. Plugins and drum programs exist discretely from tracks, like on the MPCI want to be able to have one plugin instance (since I get a max of eight on the device) and have multiple tracks drive the same program, just like I can do on the MPC. I can't see any reason why Force couldn't work this way too.
3. Apply localization to the created date in the file browser (uses EU-style mm/dd/yyyy currently)This is a small one but would be nice to get US-based date formats from the browser.
4. Configurable option for PLAY button behavior in ARRANGE and CLIPI don't understand why the PLAY button works like PLAY START on the MPC by default. I want it to work like PLAY on the MPC by default, where play happens from the playhead position and not from the beginning of the track. I'd then like to be able hit SHIFT+PLAY to play from the beginning of the track. I know people will have their own preference here so the behavior should be configurable in PREFERENCES.
5. Matrix and Arrange: ability to apply quantize to the "Back to Track/Back to Arrange" buttonsRight now, the return to the linear arrangement from a clip overdub happens as soon as you hit the "Back to Track" or "Back to Arrange" buttons. It would be nice if the behavior of these buttons was consistent with clips, where they can be quantized to kick in on-beat.
6. Matrix: ability to freeze the topmost scene row to the "Back to Track/Back to Arrange" rowWhen scrolling down through the scenes when navigating, I would like for the arrange launch pads to stay in the first row all the time.
7. Arrange: ability to apply all ARRANGE EDIT options (i.e. Insert Bars, Delete Bars, Transpose, etc.) to just one track by using the track header popupThere is no way that I can see to perform these operations on individual tracks, only on the arrangement as a whole.
8. Ability to move and reorder thingsAkai seems to fall short on this all over the MPC and Force. I can insert and add and delete, but I can't move things around. To move tracks, I have to go through a copy/paste/clobber/delete dance instead of being given the option to insert or move a track when I drop a copy. There is no way I can see to specify a move operation for a range of notes on an arranged track, either: if I wanted to shorten a track, I would have to copy the notes I wanted to move, use the replace option for the target, and then go delete the excess notes at the end of the track.
9. Arrange: Reset Channel Strip for all track types, not just audioSelf-explanatory.
10. Clip Event Editor for audio: include all the audio processing functions from Sample EditIt would be nice to be able to perform all the same kinds of operations on audio clips in the Clip Event Editor when working on an audio track, instead of having to go into sample edit and try to make the changes there. This is especially true since the Clip Event Editor has an easier workflow for dealing with audio on-beat than Sample Edit has.
11. Crossfade option for looped audio clips in the matrix, to avoid clicks and popsWhen I record a MIDI clip for an external synth and get it how I want it, I will then record the audio from that synth to make an audio clip of what I recorded to MIDI. This allows me to fire off the audio clip when working on the Force after my external synth is turned off, or if I take my Force out of the studio to work with somewhere out of the house. However, when I bounce audio from the external synth to the audio clip, I like to capture the tail of the external synth's release / effects and so on, so that if I decide to play that recording as a one-shot I can hear the tail. The problem is with looping: if I loop that audio with the tail, then I get clipping artifacts at the end of the tail since the transition isn't smooth. If I could simply turn on a crossfade in the Clip editor to crossfade that audio at the end of the clip, there would be no clipping artifacts. I can work around this by cutting a clip-length sample out of the recording to match the length of a the loop, doing a crossfade in Sample Edit, setting up a drum program to fire off the crossfaded clip, but that's a lot of unnecessary work when a simply crossfade option within the Clip would achieve the same end result.
12. Set up project options so that all samples are streamed from a drive by default, instead of living in RAMI would imagine everybody would want samples to stream from a drive by default to avoid hitting RAM limits.
13. Ability to use the COPY / EDIT / DELETE buttons to modify macros on the touch screenLet me begin by saying that the macro capability in the Force is simply amazing. I totally love it. However, there is a small quality of life change that would improve it: right now, macros for the Q-Links can be copied, edited, and deleted by using the hardware buttons and tapping the knobs you want to modify. It would be really cool if you could use the same hardware buttons to specify the kind of change you want to make (copy a knob's macros, for example) but instead of hitting the hardware knob, be able to use the touch screen to specify the copy and paste targets. Likewise, if you could copy macro assignments from one control (say, a knob) and paste them into another kind of macro (say, a crossfader assignment) that would be awesome, instead of having to rebuild the macro from scratch.