Akai Force's CPU and RAM 2024

Hi
I am sitting on the fence, having found out that force delivers in the area where no other groovebox I am aware of does, accessibility of of controls without switching menus (mute tracks, trigger clips and scenes, tweak macros, play an instrument). Naturally, you have only two hands, but instant access to these controls without can you intermediate steps makes a whole of the difference.
This is how things should be with push, machine, and others.

I wanted to check how the main I think performance determinants of this device do as of 2024. The numerous upgrades have added new synths even, and new expansions probably never turn out to be smaller than the earlier launched ones, so I wonder how force performs these days, how many tracks it can handle, depending on the content of course.

If we could qualify this a bit, let's put extreme multisamples and external instruments aside. So, all on board synths, side chain and other intense processing, however, used rationally, without a dedicated reverb on each drum pad.

I would appreciate your answers.
Thanks

I don't know if this will help you or not...

I had a Force for a while, and really enjoyed it. The 8x8 Pad grid is really great for playing a lot of instruments, and being able to split the pads from the display really opens up a number of use cases that are hard/impossible to do on other hardware.

From what I remember, the max number of tracks I believe is 128, 8 of which can be the plugin instruments (allowing for memory consumption), 8 of which can be audio tracks (the clips/loops that you'll likely want), and the rest would need to be drum kits, key groups, external midi, or CV tracks. This ought to be plenty for most people, but due to the 2gb of memory, may push some people into having to rethink how they load performances into the Force.

Why do I not have a Force right now? Well, I really figured I was going to want the Push 3, having been a long time Ableton Live user, so I decided to sell off the Force to help pay for the Push 3. When the Push 3 showed up I was quite excited initially, but I really did not like a few key things. First, the Push 3 had no arranger, barring some M4L hacks. Second, the UI is okay, but I felt that editing synths and effects on the Push 3 was much more difficult than the Force. Third, a lot of the buttons didn't feel as substantial on the Push 3 as they do on the Force. There was a fair bit of thin plastic over buttons that just felt like it would fail and tear over time, the jog wheel shifting left and right (and not up and down) made me feel like I was shifting around mixed interface styles more than I wanted to.

At any rate... both have plenty of things to enjoy, but the use cases for me at least didn't overlap as much as I would have liked, making the Push 3 a poor replacement. I have been holding out a bit to see if Akai revamps the Force with a mk2 or in some other way brings out an update revision, because I did like how it worked. Honestly, it has plenty of horsepower under the hood, and as long as you aren't making complex effect chains per sample, you can get a lot of mileage out of it.

Anyways, hope that helps, and good luck!

Hi. Thanks for the detailed information. I don't know about three but push two allowed me to do less at a time in terms of live performing than mouse, keyboard and a midi script on Ableton. Now that you mentioned that push three hasn't even embraced arrangement, it looks like it couldn't have been made in a context where a musicians have a final say.

Back to Force, eight tracks for plugins or audio sounds tolerable, considering that the more track the greater the pain of not having a dedicated array of buttons. (I presume it's not possible to connect APC mini MK2 to force to control 9 to 16 tracks? )
It is instant access I think that makes most people opt for grooveboxes, and having additional tracks for MIDI and CV is a great addition, because external instruments can be controlled using their panels.

I think I saw some of your resources on YouTube, sorry if it was not you, dedicated to Roland SP404 MK2? If yes, is this device your tool of choice for loops?

Those of you guys who have force these days,
Does it sound realistic to assume that each of the eight tracks would contain force's power hungry on board instrument, Which I think is hype?, three insert effects, and three oscillators, and the master track has three effects, the last one being limiter?
How does it sound from the perspective of RAM, CPU, stability?
This feels like a maxed out set up for me, considering that some of this will be turned into audio anyway but will give me an idea in terms of constraints.

Yeah... I've got a few SP404 mk2 videos posted

Cool, I found them very useful, thanks.

I have to say that I have yet to wrap my head around sync, both when recording and when playing back, bar-even looping included.

So is it the hardware you use for Loops these days?

I make complete tracks in it. Never ran in to issues. Though I recommend saving often since it has crashed for unknown reasons a couple of times.

64hz wrote:I make complete tracks in it. Never ran in to issues. Though I recommend saving often since it has crashed for unknown reasons a couple of times.

Exactly & Save+Shift is a must. Also save projects to both the SSD & SD after a session. Save+Shift will save to the last card you load/saved from.

This multiple long audio tracks freeze, I am thinking how much the SSD lightning speed simply exposes CPU limit, which would not be apparent when streaming from SD, with its own limits.