Thinking of Force from Live 2 - Questions.

I originally bought the MPC Live 2 coming from the 2500 and annoyed with some of the limitations of it. Recently I've bought a Oxi One and do 90% of the sequencing on that (including drums) and am really not a finger drummer (although part of sticking to an MPC as thinking maybe I would at some points.) This is making me think the Force may fit to my workflow better but I'm finding it hard to find a concise list/description of their differences. Plus there are bugs on the MPC which impede my workflow that wont be mentioned in any comparison guide.

Is the Force any better than the MPCs being controlled by MIDI? By that I mean:
- The MIDI Mapping page looks identical in the videos I've watched. Is it limiting in the same way as the MPC that is merges all devices and only references by Channel and CC or Note, not by Device?
- The MPC gets very glitchy in MIDI Learn once you have more than about 20-30 mappings. It starts changing them randomly, setting the Type to None and weird things like that. Does the Force have this bug or is it smoother in this department?
- Does the Force have the bug where pressing the Shift buttons kills all incoming MIDI?
- Does the Force have the Note Off bug where the MPC kills notes on the wrong channels when receiving Note Offs from external MIDI sometimes?

I do quite a lot of automation recording on the MPC, using a MIDI Instrument (Track on Force.) This works well in Overdub mode with only parameters which have been moved during the current loop of the Sequence (Cell) are changed and once a change has been seen it will record new data until the end of the loop. The Force seems to only have a Record button and not Overdub, how does it handle with recording in MIDI automation in this manner? If it does work smoothly like this the idea of being able to move into a blank Cell in the same Track to basically delete all automation at once will be a great improvement.

I use MIDI Instruments (Tracks) quite a lot for MIDI routing. I assume this works the same on the Force? It looks to have the same options in the manual so I think it will.

I know I can't load entire Projects from the MPC but I browse to an MPC Project Data folder and load Instruments to Tracks from there without having to save them separately?

Does the disk streaming apply to Drum and Keygroup samples? If so the shorter loading times could well be useful live.

kazakore wrote:- The MPC gets very glitchy in MIDI Learn once you have more than about 20-30 mappings. It starts changing them randomly, setting the Type to None and weird things like that. Does the Force have this bug or is it smoother in this department?
- Does the Force have the bug where pressing the Shift buttons kills all incoming MIDI?
- Does the Force have the Note Off bug where the MPC kills notes on the wrong channels when receiving Note Offs from external MIDI sometimes?

Does the disk streaming apply to Drum and Keygroup samples? If so the shorter loading times could well be useful live.

I'll answer what I can.

-I can't answer the MIDI bug thing the way you use it, but I found a bug when using MIDI-Learn where if I set a Track macro parameter to a knob & change the value it will reset to 0 if I go to another track then back to the track with that parameter. If I set the parameter the manual way it works fine, but what's the point of MIDI-Learn if I can't use it to speed up setting up parameters. Its more like MIDI-Dumb!
Here a link to a video I made showing it in action: https://youtube.com/shorts/IDgeS9AKQz0?feature=share

-The Shift stopping playback isn't a bug or at a least I don't think its is. You can use it when the Force is in slave mode & you don't want it to play in coming MIDI messages temporarily. You can turn it off via the MIDI Prefs settings by turning off Control.

-Yeah got that same MIDI Note Off bug to. Don't even get me started on that shit! I just finished moving beats from other machines to the Force & bug from hell make that process 4X longer than it should've taken.

-Yes disk-streaming works with any sample you set to use it. It's not related to the programs. Akai say it's best not to use it many short samples, but I don't know the limit before it starts to cause problems. That remindes me I need to test that out. Keep in mind Akai back in the day also recommended or said that the MPC1k/2500 CF card limit was 2GB. Me& many others used way mor than that. The highest I had is a 32GB from 2011 & it still works!

Hopefully someone else can answer the rest of you questions.

The Shift stupidity is there as well as the note-off bug. Additionally, there are bugs you don't know about yet. For example: envelope followers (which you don't have on an MPC) don't work after loading a project, you have to go and turn them off/on, one at a time, all of them. Keygroup MIDI modulation setting is reset to zero when loading a project.

Loading programs is slower on the Force than on MPCs. Disk streaming doesn't work like you think. You can't turn it on for all samples in a keygroup or drum program you're going to load. You load a sample program, go to the project sample pool and tap tap tap with the touchscreen, enable disk streaming one by one for each sample in the program. You do this by holding down your finger on a sample and selecting "Stream From Disk". This user-interface interaction takes about 2 seconds per sample file.

The Force won't make your dreams come true, and you will be disappointed. The thing it solves compared to an MPC is the overall workflow and conceptual model. The biggest thing is the "session" row/clip launch concept. There are additional features like the cross-fader, envelope followers and submix/master automation.

Its best to set a long sample to disk-streaming first before you chop it up then all of them will have it. They should still have a set all samples to stream option or all samples in a bank/program. At the same time its not so bad as is so whatever.