Exciting News From Air Music Tech Coming!!!

Saw this earlier. Looks like an announcement incoming on November 10 - what do you think they’ve got in the works?

Small-pox blankets.

Always a critic…

Looks like something’s afoot:

EnochLight wrote:Looks like something’s afoot:

If they really listen to the feedback given, then this is awesome news indeed. This could help make releases more stable and especially for the MPC Software to become useful

EDIT: hmm, damnit. Tried the link and it gives a 404

Maybe being able to save and load custom presets in the vst versions of their mpc plugins?

Do they finally hire serious beta testers?

mrmarbury wrote:EDIT: hmm, damnit. Tried the link and it gives a 404

Maybe you typed the URL wrong? Or maybe it’s getting hammered with applicants.. anyway, this link works fine for me:

https://forms.office.com/r/H5i33yjmTr

Straker wrote:Do they finally hire serious beta testers?

It's called Quality Assurance. AKAI doesn't have QA for software allegedly, otherwise their OS release wouldn't have such obvious bugs as dropping support for MP3.

The screenshot message is likely for unpaid beta testing AKA an AKAI customer.

EnochLight wrote:

mrmarbury wrote:EDIT: hmm, damnit. Tried the link and it gives a 404

Maybe you typed the URL wrong? Or maybe it’s getting hammered with applicants.. anyway, this link works fine for me:

https://forms.office.com/r/H5i33yjmTr

OMG is this really how they take people for beta testing?
It's gonna be new bugs and bugs coming soon.

EnochLight wrote:

mrmarbury wrote:EDIT: hmm, damnit. Tried the link and it gives a 404

Maybe you typed the URL wrong? Or maybe it’s getting hammered with applicants.. anyway, this link works fine for me:

https://forms.office.com/r/H5i33yjmTr

Weird. I copied the link directly from your screenshot and this is what was copied:

https://forms.office.com/r/H5i33yimTr

Funny enough I get a 404 with this. I get the form with the same URL from your post that I am replying to now ... I just don't see it

EDIT: oh wait! Apples magic copying from photos took a "j" for an "i" ... omg, never mind

Funny. In the Terms 7. they state that all communication is public but in 8 (Confidentiality) they state that I am not allowed to talk about it to others or disclose information. I am not a lawyer here but would it mean that I am not allowed to publicly tell you what's new in the beta but if I write my verdicts to InMusic or other beta testers then this communication still is legally postable here?

I have worked in QA. Assuming that something that is obvious in hindsight doesn't mean they don't have QA, it just means that either it wasn't considered to be tested or there wasn't time to put a test case in place for it, either way it is likely because it had never happened before.

If another release went out with the same problem one or more times, I might agree with you, but no software company puts in regression testing for every little thing that could happen, you typically put them in for things that have already happened, or that clearly can never happen.

Dropping MP3 support is surely egg on their face that I'd imagine they don't want to repeat, but they also didn't deliver a dead on arrival firmware that bricked everybody's MPC.

mrmarbury wrote:Funny. In the Terms 7. they state that all communication is public but in 8 (Confidentiality) they state that I am not allowed to talk about it to others or disclose information. I am not a lawyer here but would it mean that I am not allowed to publicly tell you what's new in the beta but if I write my verdicts to InMusic or other beta testers then this communication still is legally postable here?

I'm not a lawyer, but in most NDA terms it is effectively removing the beta tester's ability to communicate anything about the beta or other communications to anyone but the business, but allowing them to use your communications to them in any way they see fit.

NearTao wrote:
Dropping MP3 support is surely egg on their face that I'd imagine they don't want to repeat, but they also didn't deliver a dead on arrival firmware that bricked everybody's MPC.

You're right, this isn't even related to QA, well before the QA step, this should have been a basic unit test their software team should have written since the release of the first MPC LIVE.

mpc_fan_2022 wrote:You're right, this isn't even related to QA, well before the QA step, this should have been a basic unit test their software team should have written since the release of the first MPC LIVE. Not only that bug demonstrates they do not have a QA department, but obviously AKAI MPC Codebase doesn't even have unit tests and their software team is a bunch of amateurs... thanks for pointing that out.

I was working on a software project as a release engineer, and in a meeting an engineering manager refused to have his engineers write unit tests because he considered it quality assurance work, on the call I said "show me one engineer who refuses to write a unit test and I'll show you an engineer who shouldn't be writing software", the QA department took me out for drinks that night.

I don't have any kind of looking glass into Akai so I don't know if the mp3 testing was a build configuration issue, integration issue, or something else... at the end of the day they fixed it, and in fairly short order. I just hope that the team learned some lessons about being more proactive in this space, but who knows...