Force audio track punch in/out

I may be missing something and I've serached on here but can't find a definitive answer to whether it's possible to punch into and drop out of recording on an audio track on the Force - as I can with my Live 2 - It's surely a essential thing if you're using this stand alone?

Thanks in advance,
Steve

Not as far as I'm aware.

Let's get into this a bit, because this keeps coming up; it's about the operational model.

"I just bought a car. It's promoted as a go-anywhere vehicle. Why doesn't it have altitude control? If I'd bought a Cessna, I could have flown higher."

The basic model underlying the Force is not the same as that of an MTR such as the DP-32SD. It is that of a sampler. You get to plonk down chunks of audio in various ways, with various options such as effect assignment, velocity layering and so on. If a piece of your audio is bad, then trim it out and get a different piece. Comping is pretty easy this way, but it won't work on the same model as, for example, Pro Tools. Or the aforementioned MTR.

If this is vital to your model, what I would suggest that you do is to pair the Force with an actual MTR (there is a variety of options from the likes of Zoom and Tascam) and doing all your punch-in, cross-fade and overdubbing on a platform that is devoted to that role before copying it across for arrangement in the Force. Or, to put it in a more old-fashioned way: horses for courses.

If you are horrified at having to grab different tools for different purposes, I can only suggest that you send Akai Professional a feature request on the grounds that the Force should behave as an MTR, complete with multi-track overdubs, cross-fades and other similar features for that role. Having said that, I doubt that they would because it's a poor match between interface and function.

"Punch" is not mentioned, but for the Arrange thingy, there's "Auto Record", which the manual describes like so:

When enabled, recording will begin immediately when the arrangement loops.

That doesn't really explain it completely. It took me some time to figure out how to actually get recording to auto-start. The whole procedure seems to be like this:
- Record-enable the tracks you want
- Enable Auto Record (double-tap the arrangement time display to get to the LOCATE screen)
- Enable LOOP for the arrangement (otherwise it won't loop, and recording won't start automatically)
- Press SHIFT + REC to set recording to arrangement (instead of clip). Recording won't be auto-switched on from plain PLAY mode.
- Move the playhead to somewhere before the loop end point (unless you're happy to start from the loop start point with PLAY)
- Press SHIFT + PLAY to get the transport rolling from the current playhead position (or just PLAY to start from the loop start point)
- Wait until the playhead reaches the loop end point
- --> now when the arrangement loops, recording starts
- If you're recording on an AUDIO track, then recording automatically stops when the loop wraps the next time. But for MIDI tracks, recording never stops.

I have no idea what sense that's supposed to make.

Thank you...yes I saw the loop record thing, it kind of does what I want but not in the way Live 2 does, which is pretty seamless. I don't see the force as a 'sampling' tool per se, although it does that obviously, that's surely the realm of the MPCs? It's promoted in a way that implies standalone workstation ( website: FORCE 3.2 is the MOST POWERFUL STANDALONE music production system) - and as a standalone music production system what's the point hooking it up to an external recorder like the Zoom? If the Live 2 does it, surely the Force can and would make it much more of a complete tool for recording.

cheers
Steve

Maybe it really is the most powerful standalone system... for the kind of music that can be made with it. If you hoped to record guitars or do some kind of live audio looping, forget the whole thing. The Force is for techno, house, hip-hop. Things you can do with MIDI notes and MIDI controlled sample slices. Maybe weirdo ambient where anything goes.

Forget the ideas you get from Akai's marketing, it can be misleading. I think I even saw a video where they suggest it's good for live looping. Maybe if you've been tasked to do an advertising video for Akai and you've completely planned, pre-programmed and rehearsed your "live" looping thing, and you have as many tries as you want to record a flawless execution, then yes.

The only thing that matters is, what the device can actually do. Learn to operate the Force and figure out things you can do with it. If you come from DAW land and you have an idea you'd like to do, very likely it won't be practical to do with the Force. But if you use the functions, press the buttons and try what you can make happen, then you'll find many fun things you can make the Force do. Add some outboard MIDI and audio gear for more fun things.

I think many people would agree that the Force is still full of potential for making it even much better. Some extra development would expand the possibilities a lot towards audio-track based things, live looping, song arranging. Sample-based instruments.

Damn! You described the situation perfectly. Never fully trust Akai’s marketing

@koekepan - the way you’ve dropped the mic with the MTR analogy! Drinks at the 1st bar of the next DW are on me.

A car could behave similarly to a Cessna, albeit briefly. I choose to think that it’s the landings that would make me choose to get the proper tool for the job and not insist that car manufacturers “get their shit together”.

Was our favorite Jedi tool ever marketed as such?

Folks complaining about what they wish was there… “the way I see it”… “implications are”… and then get upset that their imagination is only in their own mind.

Thinking that Akai's so-called "audio tracks" could be used like audio tracks are used, or that Akai's so-called "arranger" could be used for arranging things, or that Akai's so-called "looper" could be used for something, these are perfectly valid and common expectations.

And if you go to a user forum and post about it when you start to realize what sort of bullshit features there actually are instead of the reasonably and commonly expected ones, you're pissed off, of course, and you can perfectly well expect to get some understanding from other users. Instead of the actual bullshit you get: being told that it was basically your own fault, why did you expect that Akai's so-called "audio tracks" would be usable, car analogy yada yada, as if the common expectations you had weren't common. "Welcome" to the so-called user community!

Thanks, @stonecoldgroove! I think we'll have a good time. Maybe the Dukes of Hazzard wanted a Cessna instead of a Charger ... nah. They made that Charger fly well enough.

What we're seeing here is a classic industrial psychology mismatch; the kind of stuff that gets taught in UI design classes. The Force isn't a great recording tool if you approach it as a classic recording device. Instead, if you treat it as a canvas into which you introduce pre-recorded elements (samples), it works very well indeed. It's rather like the difference between a table saw and a circular saw; on paper, they're both spinning blades that you use to cut lumber, but in practice they're good at different things.

The Force is arguably at least as powerful as the (now discontinued) KORG Kronos in most respects, and much stronger in some ways. You can use the Force to compose everything from a sonata to psytrance. The fact that, for example, the arranger is more like an arrangement snapshot than a composition environment is more a matter of terminology than raw capability.

Thus my advice to jaffa: figure out how to do what you want to do in a Force-ish way, rather than trying to replicate a Live-ish workflow on a machine which isn't that thing.

I'm not into Koekepan's car analogies, but the canvas analogy is spot on.

There are many things about the Force and MPC as well that are ass-backwards brain farts. Stuff that would get fixed and improved very quickly if it was open source. But it's not.

Nevertheless, I really like this Force canvas. The more I use it, the more I like it. Recently, I started making a separate project folder, with project previews, for each year and month, and in the 2023-07 folder I already have two dozen Force projects. For each project I make a project preview mp3, for which the arrangement is useful... because there's no other way. Why can't I just record a few seconds of whatever is coming out of the main outputs, as a project preview? The people who code this, don't use it. No other explanation.

Other explanation:

The people who code this, (or, more to the point, provide functional specifications to the programming team) don't use it in the way that you would wish to use it, and therefore their operational model is different from yours, with the result that their specifications are different from what you would select.

The screwdriver design team hasn't produced a great chisel yet.

Yes, or maybe they were masochists. Or maybe they could not question and fix specification brainfarts coming from some designer who can't be reasoned with. Or maybe the software development is run under crazy demands and schedules where you can't fix even clearly broken designs. Or maybe the whole thing was a big accident. Many possible explanations.

Too bad they didn't bother describing the intended operational model, so users are left wondering WTF they were thinking or smoking.