Akai dropped ball with extra plugin packages

Better Mouse Trap wrote:I'm shaking my head right now bruh,

Talked to a Akai tech the other day about future MPC "plugins" and he was clueless bruh...

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the WUB,noise,808 and the rest of the **** that came with the ren, but come on bro, 99% of those sounds are BS

If they had focused more on the quality plugins, the Ren would have made a greater impact and game changer.

Ball dropped via Akai

We need ongoing FREE plugins for The price of this damn controller let me tell it

I suspect free Akai plugins are unlikely. And if they were, I doubt they would be of higher quality than the ones already available.

For paid plugins, consider Sonivox or Air plugins. These companies and Akai fall under the same parent company....several of the plugins (including new ones) were/are tested with the MPC software.

Additionally, there is a countless number of 3rd party companies that produce high quality plugins.

I don't know of anyone that buys audio software for the built in plugins. Some software comes with great stock plugins but most serious creators reach for 3rd party plugins before anything else.

yep it s a sampler...akai better keep on working on the sound design side to make it a standart like kontakt..


just kidding just keep on improving the keygroup to be a great sampler...

pull-over wrote:yep it s a sampler...akai better keep on working on the sound design side to make it a standart like kontakt..


just kidding just keep on improving the keygroup to be a great sampler...

I hope you aren't kidding.. because if they do keep it as just a sampler..
ableton live's sampler + impulse can do more than what the renn can do.

Anyways, at this age in music making, the more accessibility, the better. Sound design has always been underground, with daft punk, kratwerk, yellow magic orchestra, trans-x, michael jeane pierre leading the way. Just about 5 years ago the radio and market, and the whole clubbing scene is hit with sounds generated by home-studio kids with their newly acquired software synths. Sound designing is HUGE right now.

The Ren & MPC Software is a workstation not a mere sampler. MPCs have never been the go to tools for sound design IMO....at least outside of this forum. Software or keyboard workstations/Synths are much better tools. The Ren & MPC software is right at home sequencing these tools.

Nothing has changed much in the past two decades. Software DAWs to include Live could always do more than any MPC. But none of those products can duplicate what an MPC to include these new MPCs bring to the table. Only recently (thanks in part to Akai), Live has two great controllers that are integrated with the software. On the level as the Ren/Studio? To include sampling, sample editing, and plugin hosting?

From what I have seen (no hands on experience with Live and it's controllers)...I am sticking with the MPC Ren/Studio. And I stand by my opinion that Akai's should focus more on the workstation and live performance aspects of the MPC software and leave the plugins and sound design stuff to 3rd parties.

I personally cannot see the point in Akai going too far in terms of audio editing capabilities, there has to be a line drawn IMO. There are already many fantastic audio editors out there and quite frankly I doubt Akai would be able to dedicate the resources to competing against those.

I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement on the existing audio editing capabilities though, but we don't need Soundforge or Adobe Audition inside an MPC.

As far as sound design goes, they should IMO concentrate on improving the more unique MPC-focussed sound design capabilities - for example, improving sample layer editing, with envelopes and filters being applied to individual layers rather than to the entire pad, ability to shift individual layers at a single sample resolution, layer phase inversion etc. Basically concentrate on the stuff that would be more intuitive to perform in an MPC environment (so you can design while playing etc) and leave the other stuff to audio editors.

Some suggested improvements for SAMPLE EDIT:

Vertical waveform zoom
Basic Crossfade looping option
Edit history to be more granular (remember edit point changes, go back more than 1 processing step)
Not essential, but really nice - ability to permanently apply 3rd party VST effects to a sample i.e. in addition to the fixed 'Processing' options
Improved threshold chopping algorithm that doesn't leave clicks at the end of most slices (one for Izotope to deal with I assume).

In fact I think the main area where sample editing should be improved is CHOP mode, again, because it's an area that integrates so naturally into the creative MPC workflow, so that's an area where I would like to see the MPC rival a standalone app like Recycle - e.g. stretch and envelope options in CHOP for example, improved editing experience in general (fix that end point selection bug for a start).

MPC-Tutor wrote:I personally cannot see the point in Akai going too far in terms of audio editing capabilities, there has to be a line drawn IMO. There are already many fantastic audio editors out there and quite frankly I doubt Akai would be able to dedicate the resources to competing against those.

I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement on the existing audio editing capabilities though, but we don't need Soundforge or Adobe Audition inside an MPC.

As far as sound design goes, they should IMO concentrate on improving the more unique MPC-focussed sound design capabilities - for example, improving sample layer editing, with envelopes and filters being applied to individual layers rather than to the entire pad, ability to shift individual layers at a single sample resolution, layer phase inversion etc. Basically concentrate on the stuff that would be more intuitive to perform in an MPC environment (so you can design while playing etc) and leave the other stuff to audio editors.

Some suggested improvements for SAMPLE EDIT:

Vertical waveform zoom
Basic Crossfade looping option
Edit history to be more granular (remember edit point changes, go back more than 1 processing step)
Not essential, but really nice - ability to permanently apply 3rd party VST effects to a sample i.e. in addition to the fixed 'Processing' options
Improved threshold chopping algorithm that doesn't leave clicks at the end of most slices (one for Izotope to deal with I assume).

In fact I think the main area where sample editing should be improved is CHOP mode, again, because it's an area that integrates so naturally into the creative MPC workflow, so that's an area where I would like to see the MPC rival a standalone app like Recycle - e.g. stretch and envelope options in CHOP for example, improved editing experience in general (fix that end point selection bug for a start).

+1

Didn't they advertise with their grrrrrreat vst's? And said something about coming with even grrrreaterrrr vst's? So if that ls the case the question is totally justified....by the way, 1.4 sux bolls