UPDATE: MPC 4000 O.S. BUG FIX - (Real Info Inside)

Just wanted to give a quick update. First off, to control expectations, don't hold your breath. I called the Worldwide HQ of Akai Pro and spoke to someone in **** **** Dept. (I don't want to name drop so people don't harass he / she). I did my best to pitch him in the 3mins he gave me. Here is what I said.

PHONE CALL BASIC INFO:

As many people, we love Akai samplers. Like many others, I purchase a MPC 4000 your flagship product. I understand the bankruptcy and how software samplers killed the market overnight. Even so, the people who purchase the "Flagship" anything are important customers. Because of the lack of support of the MPC4000 it has left a very bad feeling in the community. Regardless on what your future plans are, I believe having a subscription based sign-up for a FINAL O.S. update would be make sense financially on these grounds. If you did give them a PAID update, it would help repair this frustration with your old "Flagship" customers and that would send a signal that you are here to support your customers and that would open many of them back up to purchasing the new products you have coming out. I told them I would put in some work as well, working with the couple people on here that track the bugs for the 4K and help point people to where they can reserve their O.S update.


Feel free to comment below but please keep them positive or post if FOR REAL (I mean it) you would put down the money for the O.S. update on the MPC4000.

Timeline: I was told I will get a call back by the end of the week or next week and yes they did take all my info down. They are going to talk to some upper management and engineers

P.S. I am doing my best for you, I have learned a lot so I am trying to give back in the best way I know how, with my gift of gab and negotiations.


-D

I dont feel it should be paid upgrade, but I guess it's better than nothing, doubt it's going to happen tho

Im for it

konc3pt wrote:I dont feel it should be paid upgrade, but I guess it's better than nothing, doubt it's going to happen tho

Im for it

At this point, paid will most likely the only way they would do it because the company that owns Akai will need to spend resources in-house to do it. I think I made the case as good as I could in the limited time I had. Hope for the best.

Regardless of the past baggage, I would def pay for an update to the 4k to add a few 5k features like mute groups and add an improved chop shop 3.0. Of course, fix the gain, split tracks, and sysex bugs without introducing a bunch of new ones.

I would put down money and I don't even own one.

But i know the power of this machine and hope to buy it in the future.

Pay them?

If they pay ME, I'd re-write the User Guide for them

Here we go again!

This has been tried on a few occasions over the years, we even got in contact with freelance programmers that had the source code but the person who was setting it up dissapeared. Hope it goes better this time!

And feline, they should pay you to do that but you know... aint gonna happen.

feline1 wrote:Pay them?

If they pay ME, I'd re-write the User Guide for them

Feline1

You are one of the people I had in mind to help gather together the master list of bugs that need to be addressed. We could use a new user guide as well, if this does provide fruit, would you want that to be mentioned?

OP, is this going to be a bug fix only? can they introduce minor new features? like pad mute, maybe?

dalkore, even if there was no new OS,
users would still benefit greatly from an updated MPC4000 Reference Guide,
which includes all the changes listed in the Addendum documents for OS 1.16, 1.2, 1.3, 1.33, 1.4, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.71, 1.blahblahblah. (as it stands, if you read the original Reference Guide, a lot of the stuff is wrong now! and you have to search through about 10 other PDFs to double check ... pain in the ass)


This would be a fairly straightforward and routine job for a professional technical author like myself, were it not for the fact that Akai LOST THE SOURCE FILES.

The original MPC4000 user guide was written, in Japanese, in Adobe FrameMaker (industry standard format for long technical documents),
and translated into English by a translation firm in the Netherlands - this was in 2002.

However by the time Akai had gone bust twice, they'd lost the FrameMaker files, and all we have are the final PDFs. Ex-Akai employees have searched, including the guy who wrote the (far superior) Ak.Sys 2.5 User Guide, but no joy.

So, it would be necessary to waste dozens of man-hours barfing out the PDF into rich text or plain text or something like that, and reformatting the whole sorry thing back into a new FrameMaker template, re-inserting all the screenshots, rebuilding all the cross-references......
the job would take about 10 or 15 times longer.
Bloody nuisance.

No way would I do that for free at this point in my life!

This is interesting. I hope that akai considers this. It would definately earn numarkai (or what ever we call them tese days) some respect. They may have a lot of clients (people who bought an akai pro product) however I like to think we are a bit more then that, we are a damn community based around a damn drum machine. This might be a good patch for akai's problem of losing our loyalty. In a way they need us, we are the people who print shirts with an mpc on it, paint graff productions with an mpc in it, we customise our mpcs with new paint jobs and hardware.. you get the drift. MPC's obviously dont just fill the roll of a drum machine in our lives. Even if we have to pay for this new OS, it will show us that we still matter even though we aren't copping the newer products.

id pay for it!

I'd pay for it

I'd also pay AKAI to kill the bugs!

TSR

I would definitely pay for an OS update-IF they included some new functions. Simply fixing bugs is not something I'd pay for at this point.