Between the nursery rhymes and irrelevant reactions there seems to be confusion.
The Akai MPC500 is
unusable. Not imperfect,
completely unusable for serious work.
Example.
1. Turn on
2. Mode Load
3. Cursor Right , Data Wheel Right, Cursor Down, Do It
4. Pad 1, Do It
5. Track, Pad 1
The sample should be triggered, but it isn't. Why?
6. Mode Program, Data Wheel Right
It isn't assigned!
Now imagine you are in a good mood and sit down to play something. You assign 12 samples, which requires a lot of turns and clicks, then go to your track to play... But there's nothing there! So you have to start all over again. How does that make you feel?
But maybe it's not that big of a deal, and you continue on. An hour goes by, and you're happy with an arrangement, so you save. But the next day when you try to open it, you see, "CPU Addr (read) PC (883e24de)" and it's lost. How does that make you feel?
Check my previous posts. This has been almost two years. I try and use my MPC500, but it has so many unpredictable bugs that I can't do anything because there's no guarantee after pouring your heart out into this little thing that seconds later it'll crash and it's gone.
So I stash it away and wait for bugfixes. The recent 1.31 release fixed some, so I waited for the day to finally start making music again. But when I get setup and sit down to work, I find it is still buggy and does not work for completing a serious task.
Now maybe yours works. That's how bugs are, they only appear with specific variables. Maybe there's something about how my autoload is setup that causes this sample assign bug. But the fact is, it hit me recently, and totally destroyed my flow.
Then I sequence MIDI tracks, and am being expressive with lots of slider changes, and that causes the machine to tweak out. The MIDI clock tempo literally slows down and speeds up as the MPC struggles to keep up with only a couple tracks!
But I don't know about this bug because it is new, so I don't know to stop recording, and it gets overloaded and freezes. Now that song is gone, vanished into thin air. This is just the new stuff in the last couple days as I brought the MPC back out to try again.
It's getting old. The machine doesn't seem to be a special case because it passes diagnostic tests and other people report the same bugs. Akai said they didn't change manufacturing, since this is one of the first ones made, so it's not like it's a hardware prob.
The answer seems to be what everyone already knows. Numark produces buggy code. But with the 1000/2500 people have an alternative OS. The 500/5000 people have no such choice. They are stuck with Numark. That means risking encountering bugs.
Some people don't hit the bugs. That's why they're bugs, because they are hidden between the cracks. It's only certain variables arranged into certain configurations that causes them to crawl out and climb in your soup. If you're in-depth, odds are you'll hit some.
That is why people need an explicit warning if they are considering purchasing this, because I need to go back in the past and tell myself 2 years ago that you'll suffer if you choose this path. Meanwhile, I'm screwed and am trying to figure out an escape route.
I want the power of a WAV/MIDI sequencer, with the realtime creative expression of live instruments. My setup takes a lot of thinking behind it because it is not cookie-cutter. I don't sample vinyl and bang my fingers as hard as I can to trigger simple rap beats.
But all the gear I purchased was based around the MPC500. With that piece of the chain weak, the rest falls. That is a lot of time and money wasted. So now I try and find clever ways to pick up the pieces, because Akai is not going to help, and JJ isn't either.
There isn't much out there though. Everything is software now. There's the Roland SP404/555, which seem like excellent possibilities because they are like actual instruments, which the MPC500 wasn't really designed for. But they have their own faults.
So for people out there in the same situation, which probably isn't you, this is info that can help guide you down the right path. It may be the MPC500, but if you're basing this solely on paper you're getting the wrong idea. It is for simple triggering of samples, real basic MIDI, that's it.
In theory something like the MPC500 could do all the basic stuff that a program like Ableton Live can. But in practice, it is not a creative device at all. It does not have realtime workflow when it comes to audio, only MIDI. You cannot sample without stopping.
The pads were designed for large brutes who pound on them like a caveman, they are not comfortable for soft touch or intimate expression. The software is designed more to make life easier for the developer, not the musician. It is full of major bugs.
Maybe it can be fixed. Maybe this is the one defective unit out there. But before you do like I did and waste your money, building around it as the "Music Production Center" as it is claimed to be, think about it and make sure you know exactly why you need it.
There must be better ways, and I'll share what I find. If others do the same, then the journey becomes that much easier.
)
