New Plugins Available to Buy From Akai

as someone who bought his MPC One to play keygroup/multisamples as much as for the sampling/looping, i'm happy to get more traditional acoustic instruments available on the platform. Studio Strings is probably a must have for me, and I'll be okay paying a little more than a normal expansion pack if they're of the quality i expect they are. FM Synth i have covered with a Digitone, so unless i hear a demo that blows it away, likely don't need another 4-op. Electric piano for as much (little) as I use that sound, the current Electric plugin and F9 keygroups probably have me covered for EPs. Piano and Fabric are intriguing but would have to hear a lot more to know if I'd adopt at that price. But i don't -- much -- mind paying to make my MPC as powerful as it can be. more sound options are generally better when it's the sampling centerpiece of my gear

Way more then I was expecting, but I did have a feeling.. why would they be cheap, then you could just get a one and basically have a keys..
Now you really get your money's worth it if buying a keys..
Sadly, I'm not sure they will ever be cheaper without hurting sales of the keys honestly..
Well I guess I need to buckle up.. it hurts but I want them.. seven days to hustle and come up with $500 and most of all... Convince my wife!! That is gonna be the tricky part..

Wow $999 Full Price. I'll definitely be getting the bundle. Odd that they dont work on OSX Mojave though. I'm on Mojave to keep my AIR FX Collection working. Oh well, still gonna demo all of them and try to get them to work.

I will say that it is strange that they counted "The Fabric Collection" as 1 plugin. How does that make the MPC Key 61 come with 25 plugins? Strange counting and even stranger counting. That's Akai for you!

kja wrote:Way more then I was expecting, but I did have a feeling.. why would they be cheap, then you could just get a one and basically have a keys..
Now you really get your money's worth it if buying a keys..
Sadly, I'm not sure they will ever be cheaper without hurting sales of the keys honestly..
Well I guess I need to buckle up.. it hurts but I want them.. seven days to hustle and come up with $500 and most of all... Convince my wife!! That is gonna be the tricky part..

You have a month and 7 days, the intro sale ends JULY 31st. Plenty of time for a demo.

MPC-Tutor wrote:https://www.thempcstore.com/mpc-plugin-instruments/

Surprised at the pricing TBH, a lot more than I was expecting. I suspect there will be black friday deals a plenty though.

Have been beta testing all these for a few months now, all seem to work fine in the current hardware. And despite the claim that the MPC Software versions require minimum Macos 10.15 I can confirm they work fine in Mojave 10.14.6.

Oh, and 'The MPC Instrument Collection' - they could have thought of an original name there guys, I've had the 'MPC Instrument collection' on my site for several years now. Looks like I'm going to have to change the name to avoid confusion!

Thanks for the confirmation on Mojave, sorry for not reading. I'm currently running version 10.14.6. Thankfully I don't have to change OS.

KaoticShock wrote:

kja wrote:Way more then I was expecting, but I did have a feeling.. why would they be cheap, then you could just get a one and basically have a keys..
Now you really get your money's worth it if buying a keys..
Sadly, I'm not sure they will ever be cheaper without hurting sales of the keys honestly..
Well I guess I need to buckle up.. it hurts but I want them.. seven days to hustle and come up with $500 and most of all... Convince my wife!! That is gonna be the tricky part..

You have a month and 7 days, the intro sale ends JULY 31st. Plenty of time for a demo.

Oh sorry so excited I rushed.. Well that's way way better then.. I was kinda worried, but still.. I'm getting these no matter what.. I'm a little slut for Akai.. honestly they could name there price.. I'm just so glad mpc is getting this strong!!

kja wrote:

nkozyra wrote:Wow.

Anyone who spends $150 or more on these is going to be extremely disappointed.

This price point must exist to theoretically justify the cost of the keyboard.

I wouldn't have paid more than $10/ea for the existing plugins. They're just so barebones.

How do you know any of this? Do you have them?

Unless they're radically different/better than what's offered currently, there's no way they're worth $150 or more.

And if they end up being significantly better I'm going to wonder why they even bothered giving us middling hardware plugins in the first place. Why not make those decent as well?

I wholly believe they'll be at the same level of quality as hype/drumsynth/tubesynth. Just my opinion.

Bundling them all with the keyboard helps the marketing, ie yes, this thing is $1900 but you get $1000 of (not great) plugins for free!

This plugins comes as .exe file?

So basically Fabric, I really like it, so much in fact that I've spent time creating a preset pack for it, 100+ presets pretty much ready to go live with bar some demos/previews etc. However after seeing the pricing I'm now wondering how many people will a) own Fabric and b) be looking for presets. It's a small niche!

IMO the 4 Fabric plugins could have all been combined into a single 'Fabric' plugin. Fabric XL is simply higher CPU/memory version of Fabric. The separate piano plugins should also have just been the piano presets in the Fabric plugin. Perhaps they are more CPU and memory efficient than running them in the main plugin.

So while it's being offered as a suite of 4 plugins, Fabric should be viewed effectively just one plugin, a rompler/synth.

As for pricing, $500 normal price is pitting it against the like of Omnisphere or UVI Falcon (which is actually much cheaper), all of which are often also available at discounted prices as well. Fabric is no Omnisphere, not even close, It's nice and a good standalone rompler/synth, but it's not in the same league sonically or feature-wise, and I suspect you won't be seeing the same dedication to ongoing updates. I was expecting $99 discounted, $150 standard.

As for the other plugins, I think you should definitely download the trials and decide whether the sounds suit your needs. I personally found the 'Stage Piano' did not sound good to my ears at all, but we all have different tastes, otherwise there wouldn't be 1000s of piano VSTs and Kontakt instruments out there all battling it out. Lots of tweaking available in the Stage Piano plugin though so it's good for that.

OPX4 - I'm not an FM guy so I didn't test this plugin. How does it compare feature-wise to FM8, Operator or Uvi FM Suite?

MPC-Tutor wrote:So basically Fabric, I really like it, so much in fact that I've spent time creating a preset pack for it, 100+ presets pretty much ready to go live with bar some demos/previews etc. However after seeing the pricing I'm now wondering how many people will a) own Fabric and b) be looking for presets. It's a small niche!

IMO the 4 Fabric plugins could have all been combined into a single 'Fabric' plugin. Fabric XL is simply higher CPU/memory version of Fabric. The separate piano plugins should also have just been the piano presets in the Fabric plugin. Perhaps they are more CPU and memory efficient than running them in the main plugin.

So while it's being offered as a suite of 4 plugins, Fabric should be viewed effectively just one plugin, a rompler/synth.

As for pricing, $500 normal price is pitting it against the like of Omnisphere or UVI Falcon (which is actually much cheaper), all of which are often also available at discounted prices as well. Fabric is no Omnisphere, not even close, It's nice and a good standalone rompler/synth, but it's not in the same league sonically or feature-wise, and I suspect you won't be seeing the same dedication to ongoing updates. I was expecting $99 discounted, $150 standard.

As for the other plugins, I think you should definitely download the trials and decide whether the sounds suit your needs. I personally found the 'Stage Piano' did not sound good to my ears at all, but we all have different tastes, otherwise there wouldn't be 1000s of piano VSTs and Kontakt instruments out there all battling it out. Lots of tweaking available in the Stage Piano plugin though so it's good for that.

OPX4 - I'm not an FM guy so I didn't test this plugin. How does it compare feature-wise to FM8, Operator or Uvi FM Suite?

I use Ableton so I have Operator, and while OPx4 is definitely nowhere close to Operator, it is still comprehensive enough to make and tweak interesting sounds in the traditional FM way. No visual algorithms, but the mod matrix is definitely going to be interesting. I also have FM8, which is in a completely different league from Operator.

$499 is fair to me. I'm used to paying for Romplers and I have Nexus, AIR Structure, and Sampletank. I'm really excited to update my firmware and try out these new instruments!

149$ for acoustic piano?
149$ for electric piano?

Ahahahahahahah.
Noooooo wayyyyyyyyy.

That's totally silly.

KaoticShock wrote:$499 is fair to me. I'm used to paying for Romplers and I have Nexus, AIR Structure, and Sampletank. I'm really excited to update my firmware and try out these new instruments!

Yes, I'm sure most pro and semi pro users are probably not going to think too hard about dropping $500 on the complete collection, it's ultimately more options, which means quicker workflow and happier clients

Hobby producers will probably find it harder to justify these prices, but I fully expect these are prices designed to allow for heavy future discounts and deals. Akai are always running 50% off promos, typically 3-4 times a year, probably see these on pluginboutique for exclusive sales every so often, like all the other AIR stuff.

I hope you're right. 50% off would still be expensive but at least fits at the top of the reasonable.

MPC-Tutor wrote:

KaoticShock wrote:$499 is fair to me. I'm used to paying for Romplers and I have Nexus, AIR Structure, and Sampletank. I'm really excited to update my firmware and try out these new instruments!

Yes, I'm sure most pro and semi pro users are probably not going to think too hard about dropping $500 on the complete collection, it's ultimately more options, which means quicker workflow and happier clients

Hobby producers will probably find it harder to justify these prices, but I fully expect these are prices designed to allow for heavy future discounts and deals. Akai are always running 50% off promos, typically 3-4 times a year, probably see these on pluginboutique for exclusive sales every so often, like all the other AIR stuff.

What pro or semipro plugin can you have on a 2gb shared cpu/ram soc?
Come on. Let's be serious.
That's overoverpriced.
The most stupid move from Akai since 5 years.

Straker wrote:What pro or semipro plugin can you have on a 2gb shared cpu/ram soc?
Come on. Let's be serious.
That's overoverpriced.
The most stupid move from Akai since 5 years.

My point is that if someone is using the MPC 'professionally' then they probably don't care too much about paying over the odds for a platform-specific set of plugins like these. They'd rather have the plugins than not have them.

I don't think anyone is under the illusion that these plugins are pound-for-pound equal to mass market, top dog ones like Omnisphere, but ultimately they are going to be useful for working MPC producers who want a wide range of sounds to work in standalone with. Most working producers don't have time to come to forums and moan about plugin prices, they just buy the plugins and go away and make music & money with them.

xx% will buy at full price, xx% will wait for initial discounts ('any' discounts), xx% are fairly price sensitive and will wait until black friday etc, xx% will never buy (but will probably be the most negatively vocal about it all).