"Buying the Akai Force"... UNTESTED ..."was a big mistake"

Espen Kraft bought an Akai Force based on looking at the specs, without trying it first, expecting it to be possible to use the arrangement thingy for handling the backing tracks for a whole show, in one big project without loading between songs.

Don't waste your time watching the video though. What the problem was, is not explained, let alone shown in the video. (Yeah well, it's a video site, so why show people what you're talking about) The problem is described in the video description text:

If I fill up the arrangement mode with all the audio tracks, for all the songs, it just turns into a mush of syrup and becomes laggy and not fast enough to zoom in/out if I have to star a song over etc. If I load and close each song, in real time, it simply takes too long and it won't work for how I want to segue between songs live.

Yeah, once you go past about 90 bars or so, the arrangement starts to act weird, and it's just basically not up for something like what Espen tried to do.

Me & him were going back and forth over, not putting what the mistake was in the video. He kept replying to people to read the description because that's what he does before every video he watches. I kept telling him that's not how most ppl use YouTube...he seems like a loveable **** kind of guy.

What comes to the actual use-case of doing the backing tracks for a full show with several songs in the same project, I think it could be doable with the current Force software version, just not in the arrangement, and not by expecting it to work like a regular DAW. Something like, split the stems to audio clips and use scenes for songs or song sections. Tempo changes will need to be done somehow.

Anyway, I can't blame Espen for getting the idea that the arrangement view should be able to do that. It has audio tracks where you can load wavs, it has a timeline, locators, ... But the sad truth is, if your timeline is long, it starts to break up and act weird and becomes basically unusable.

Total crappy video , he should show the actual problem , it might be user error or bug

SakisX wrote:Total crappy video , he should show the actual problem , it might be user error or bug

Yup. Now try telling him that in the comments like I did. If you haven't already.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:What comes to the actual use-case of doing the backing tracks for a full show with several songs in the same project, I think it could be doable with the current Force software version, just not in the arrangement, and not by expecting it to work like a regular DAW. Something like, split the stems to audio clips and use scenes for songs or song sections. Tempo changes will need to be done somehow.

Anyway, I can't blame Espen for getting the idea that the arrangement view should be able to do that. It has audio tracks where you can load wavs, it has a timeline, locators, ... But the sad truth is, if your timeline is long, it starts to break up and act weird and becomes basically unusable.

I saw that video and was wondering myself what he encountered. Wow so he tried building his full show in the arranger. It does seem like it should be doable, but there's not enough locators available to keep track of things. I have never pushed it past that many bars before... that is very interesting. It looked like he was using audio tracks and small parts so it didn't seem like a whole lot of data. Something Akai needs to review.... the machine is marketed as a performance workstation. Now that people are really putting it to the test it's not doing well in the performance area.

Handling locators is not the main issue. Try inserting a whole show's worth of audio on the arrangement timeline and you'll see. Basic navigation starts to go crazy. Maybe they had the MPC's 5 minute limit as a goal, so they didn't bother testing it with anything much longer than that.

The other thing is MR. 80s Man isn't an MPC head, which would've helped to come up with a work a round. Still Akai needs to address his issues in an update if possible or at least acknowledge it & let us know if it can be fixed or not.

But he made a video about using some auto-sampling software called SampleRobot where he had the Force in the vid & commented that now you gotta make a Force auto-sampling demo, but he won't use anything other than the arranger & not interested in the other features like sampling