Audio track record limitation?

I'm pretty sure everyone is going to hate this, but...

I know jack about MIDI and sequencing. What I need is 1) a drum machine I can tap out beats on, and 2) extra hands, so to speak, during live performance. This is what I use the MPC Live for.

So long story short, until I figure out the "right" way to do all this, with sequencing, sampled audio, MIDI tracks, etc., here's my idea.

I want to go into my DAW and export an entire song, but with all the tracks/parts that will be played live muted. This will amount to the MPC Live handling drums and various synth parts while the band (me and either 1 or 2 other people, depending) plays bass, guitars and some synth parts live.

Can I export, say, an 8-minute WAV (that's my longest song) and have the MPC just play that? And do that for multiple songs, forming a live set? Ideally, each one would be loaded as a Sequence, so I could have like 5 Sequences (songs) loaded into a Project, so I hit Play, and we're off, playing the live set of 5 songs. I know that these WAV files aren't Sequences so technically that's not what's happening, but can I load them as Samples playing under an empty Sequence or something? I realize I'm pretty much just using the MPC in this case as an MP3 player as a backing "track" (well, multiple backing tracks) but this would solve a problem for me.

GeoffZ wrote:Can I export, say, an 8-minute WAV (that's my longest song) and have the MPC just play that? And do that for multiple songs, forming a live set? Ideally, each one would be loaded as a Sequence, so I could have like 5 Sequences (songs) loaded into a Project, so I hit Play, and we're off, playing the live set of 5 songs. I know that these WAV files aren't Sequences so technically that's not what's happening, but can I load them as Samples playing under an empty Sequence or something? I realize I'm pretty much just using the MPC in this case as an MP3 player as a backing "track" (well, multiple backing tracks) but this would solve a problem for me.

Yes, you absolutely can do this - just load each 8-minute long sample into a Drum Program and trigger it via a pad. That said, you are constrained by the amount of free RAM you have since all samples are loaded into RAM (which, at the end of the day, you don't even start off with 2 GB free - more like 1300 MB after the firmware loads).

40 minutes of stereo WAV files loaded into RAM at 44.1 Khz will take up roughly 807-847 MB (as it's converted to 32-bit floating point), so you should be good to go with 1 song project cramming 5 songs at 8 minutes each per Project, leaving room for even more songs per Project or plenty of effects. But you can always load up another Project with your next set anyway! For the record, MPC-Tutor has done a real-world test and was able to load a total of 1130 MB of 32-bit floating point samples before getting the "Memory Too Low" warning.

Test file sizes here (choose 32-bit): https://www.colincrawley.com/audio-file ... alculator/

Do you have an MPC Live so you can try out a test run?

Source:

https://www.mpc-tutor.com/how-much-memo ... ive-mpc-x/

First of all, thanks a million for replying.

Okay, I do have an MPC Live and I have successfully loaded 5 entire songs (.WAV files) of varying lengths and assigned each as a sample to a distinct Pad. This effectively accomplishes what I asked about. It's a little weird because the Transport does not operate on Samples like it does for Tracks. The Pad will start the Sample, but to stop it you have to hit Stop twice. This returns to the beginning so you can't Stop and resume playing from where you stopped. And you don't want to hit more than one Pad at a time cause then you get multiple songs playing at the same time. I'm sure all of this is intuitive if you routinely work with Samples, but it's a bit awkward for me. There's definitely some flexibility sacrificed (obviously!), but as I've acknowledged, this is certainly not the intended use of an MPC, so no complaints. Don't tell Roger Linn!

If that’s all u want, u might want to consider a simpler machine


electribe 2 sampler or FIIO X1/X3
the FIIO plays HIFI WAV files and is only limited by the SD card size. It has no internal memory for music.



https://www.pitbullaudio.com/fiio-x1-2n ... r-red.html

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/ ... music.html

I primarily use it as a drum machine, but ultimately I need to figure out how to sync my synth arpeggiators to it, etc. I don't need to do anything too crazy and I have actually been wondering lately if it's the right thing for me. There's a lot to like about it, but it's not the easiest piece of gear to use. I will say, however, that the Live is a million times more intuitive than the MPC1000 that it replaced. I couldn't figure that thing out to save my life.

Being able to tap out a beat on multiple pads and then explode each pad to its own track for export to the DAW is probably the thing that will keep my forever tied to it, though, that's pretty crucial to me for mixing.

For live performance, it's been a hindrance for me that I haven't taken the time to learn how to reproduce my recordings as sequences in the MPC. Or rather, the parts of my recordings that will not be played live because there aren't enough hands or instruments. For example, I use 2 synths and I may record 3 different patches from each synth on a song (so 6 individual tracks). To reproduce that live, I'd need 3 physical instances of Synth 1 and 3 physical instances of Synth 2, each dedicated to a single patch for that song, and then I'd need at least 3 people to play them (1 person playing 2 synths simultaneously). Obviously I don't want to buy 4 more synths (I mean, I would love to buy 4 more synths, but not if they're just duplicates of the ones I already have), and even less appealing is the idea of adding people to my band.

The irony is that because I'm a MIDIot, I record all my synth parts by playing them live into the DAW like a caveman. I'm going to do this live with essentially a backing track behind the band. The latter feels like 'cheating,' but that's all that would be happening anyway if I had it all sequenced in the MPC because there's no real need for me to manipulate anything that would be sequenced (if I had that figured out) in a live performance. The other irony is that the way synths are often recorded is kind of 'cheating' because they're not actually being played, they're just programmed in. But ultimately the problem I'm trying to solve is that there's not enough of me in time/space to recreate my recordings in a live situation, Although plenty of people probably think there's more than enough of me in time/space in general.

GeoffZ wrote:Don't tell Roger Linn!

Roger hasn't been at akai for like 17 years or more and he strongly dislikes jack odonnel / the new akai.

"In 2004, following a US distribution deal, the Akai Professional Musical Instrument division was acquired by Jack O'Donnell, owner of Numark Industries and Alesis. In 2012, inMusic Brands was formed as a parent company for O'Donnell's companies, including Akai Professional."

Roger Linn calling Jack O'Donnel a bastard lol
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMRxUC77RQ

I hear you, but I still think he'd throw up if he knew I was using the ancestor of his sequencer as an MP3 player. On the other hand, I just exploded a track with 3 pads to 3 separate tracks in 9 different BPMs until I was able to match what I had recorded as a single track months ago without noting the BPM, so now I can fix something that has been annoying me for a long time on that song. I don't know how he'd feel about that but I'm pretty happy about it!