Recording clip matrix to arrangement drops audio clips if...

You have Row "Set Tempo" enabled.
MPC One FW 3.6.0 Plus Pack

I have a project using Clip Matrix and I really want to export it to work on it further in the DAW. There are 8 scenes and two of 12 tracks are audio.

I am using Row "Set Tempo" to change tempo between some scenes.

I get a popup error when doing "Record to Arrangement" saying that Audio Recording has stopped due to an unexpected tempo change. It keeps recording the MIDI parts. Sometimes it looks like the audio is printing but when it's done, look at the arrangement and usually only the first clips are there and the rest of the audio track(s) are empty.

I made a new simpler project and the same thing happens. If I remove Row "Set Tempo" then I do not get the error.

Akai Support (which I strongly suspect is either partially or fully AI driven) said, "oh yeah, that's because MIDI Sync is on and you should use MTC instead. I'm so sure this is the problem that I'm going to soft-close this issue". Well, there's no MIDI coming in, no external devices attached, and I went to Preferences->MIDI/SYNC and turned everything I could off, with no change.

I asked chatGPT, which I understand is wrong about many things, and it told me that this is an architectural limitation of the MPC but I could fix it by mapping my audio clips to pads in a drum program and then playing them as needed. You have to delete the audio tracks for this to work, supposedly.

I started trying to do this last night but got bogged down. Whether or not this conclusion by chatGPT is true, all I really want to do is get the bits loaded into Ableton Live. So I am going to try deleting the audio tracks and just recording the Clip Matrix scenes with their tempo changes into an arrangement, then saving that as an Ableton file. Pull that into Ableton, add the audio tracks then go find the samples off the SD card and drop them in where they belong.

This seems fairly ridiculous so I just thought I'd check here to see what other people's experiences have been.

Thanks!

DL

The MPC cannot record audio while the tempo is changing. For that reason, audio recording also does not work when the MPC is acting as a MIDI sync follower, and it will fail if the tempo is changed via Clip Row settings or if tempo automation is embedded in the sequence. In all of these cases, the error message is consistent.

If you are using a Clip Matrix–based workflow, exporting to Ableton format and doing the arrangement in Ableton is probably the best approach.

Elijah wrote:The MPC cannot record audio while the tempo is changing. For that reason, audio recording also does not work when the MPC is acting as a MIDI sync follower, and it will fail if the tempo is changed via Clip Row settings or if tempo automation is embedded in the sequence. In all of these cases, the error message is consistent.

If you are using a Clip Matrix–based workflow, exporting to Ableton format and doing the arrangement in Ableton is probably the best approach.

Well thank you for the explanation, it does make sense although not in the "value to the end user" way. What's idiotic about this is that the available audio (at least in my case) was recorded at the exact same tempo as the current row tempo, there's no need to re-record it, just copy the data, but NOooooo. In the case of playback I can see avoiding a CPU overload, but when rendering, no such risk exists.

I've just exported my 8-scene MPC project to Ableton format. Few things to observe:

a) At least for me, there's no particular need to generate or save the arrangement to clips.
b) Set tail to 0 or else all your clips get blank space added on the end.
c) Close to a deal breaker, all clips appear to be rendered at the global tempo at the time of saving the file. Since the original audio clips were recorded at the tempo they were saved at (no pitch shifting), warping them back to their original tempo will run them through another processing step. Even though Ableton supports the ability to have tempo per scene, MPC did not attempt to take advantage of it. Well, at least I'm getting to know their tech support system.

So now I'm wondering again whether I should render the Ableton project MIDI to MIDI instead of audio and then go find the actual audio samples on the MPC's SD card and drop them into Ableton.

I'm willing to do it once for this project but man I would really like them to make this work better. Just like with the time signature, do we really expect that having a tune with different tempos in different sections is "weird"? I know the answer.

Update, it was not all doom and gloom. I added tempo settings manually and it sounds OK. Yes it could be made easier. I raised a ticket with Akai support, they agreed.