Long sample is cutoff after 1 1/2 measures

I'm stumped on this one. I was messing around with the guitar, bass synth, and drums and ended up with a 12-bar bass pattern I first saved as a MIDI track, but then sampled it to a pad so I wouldn't have to bother saving the synth patch on my keyboard. It sounds perfect when I hit the pad, but when I record the hit and play it back, the sample cuts off after 1 1/2 measures. I even tried saving the sample, loading an empty sequence and recording it again. Same thing happens everytime. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Chisel

chop your samples smaller and this won't happen

So is this a known defect? What is the threshold before it starts occuring? One bar? Two bars? Four bars? Why does it let me save samples of this length if it doesn't support it? Maybe I should be asking Akai these questions.

Thanks,
Chisel
www.soundclick.com/chisel316

oh, is there really such a bug ?
there could be a few valid reasons for this to happen.

i am away right now, but if in a week time you up your thread with a link to dowload the stuff which create the problem, i'll try it on my mpc to see.

try going into trim, use play from and play to, see if it really is the full sample.

Chisel wrote:I'm stumped on this one. I was messing around with the guitar, bass synth, and drums and ended up with a 12-bar bass pattern I first saved as a MIDI track, but then sampled it to a pad so I wouldn't have to bother saving the synth patch on my keyboard. It sounds perfect when I hit the pad, but when I record the hit and play it back, the sample cuts off after 1 1/2 measures. I even tried saving the sample, loading an empty sequence and recording it again. Same thing happens everytime. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Chisel

on the main page, check your loop length in the top right. adjust it to fit the length of your sample. by default it is 2 bars. you will hear the whole sample if you hit the pad, but when you record the pad hit, and the play it back, your sample will stop at the end of the second bar because the sequence is set to loop back to the beginning.

it could be cutting off at 1 1/2 measures because the tempo of the sample doesn't match the tempo of the sequence.

hope this helps

I did some more troubleshooting. The sequence is set to 12 bars. Loop mode is on. The sample sounds perfect in the trim screen. The sample is the same tempo as the sequence. For fun, I muted the drum track and guess what? The bass sample played back fine. So I started deleting notes from the drum track. Turns out that the bass sample cuts off exactly 1 1/2 measures after the drum track starts! For example, if the drum track starts on the 5th bar, the bass track plays from the 1st bar until halfway through bar 6. This is really odd. The drums and bass are separate programs. They don't even share the same pads (all the drums are in bank C and the bass is in bank A). I'm going to experiment with different drum samples on different pads and see if I can find a pattern here.

Peace \/
Chisel
www.soundclick.com/chisel316

Chisel wrote:I did some more troubleshooting. The sequence is set to 12 bars. Loop mode is on. The sample sounds perfect in the trim screen. The sample is the same tempo as the sequence. For fun, I muted the drum track and guess what? The bass sample played back fine. So I started deleting notes from the drum track. Turns out that the bass sample cuts off exactly 1 1/2 measures after the drum track starts! For example, if the drum track starts on the 5th bar, the bass track plays from the 1st bar until halfway through bar 6. This is really odd. The drums and bass are separate programs. They don't even share the same pads (all the drums are in bank C and the bass is in bank A). I'm going to experiment with different drum samples on different pads and see if I can find a pattern here.

Peace \/
Chisel
www.soundclick.com/chisel316

hmm, could be you have reached the polyphony limit then, is a pad hit exactly on the point the long sample cuts off?

I had this problem when I first got my MPC. I updated to the latest OS and it no longer happens.

Even with the most recent OS (not including 2.0, haven't seen it yet so couldn't tell you) sample dropout like this can occur. It's a result of exceeding polyphony, as Mr modnaR said.

The 1k is 32-note polyphonic, but if all your samples are stereo that reduces it to 16 notes. Any samples that are still trailing off are included in this voice count. Note stealing is performed on oldest notes, I believe, which will cause your longest-playing sample to cut out first. (an unfortunate but impossible to avoid byproduct of the note stealing scheme)

Try converting your drums and anything else that doesn't use the stereo field to its full potential to mono, and you should be fine. It might seem like short drum hits couldn't possibly cause such a problem, I fell victim to it too until I realized that's exactly what it was.

-tank.

The polyphony is actually only 32 notes? Is that something that could possibly be corrected by OS2.0?

I record a lot of live guitar and bass which may be 4 or 8 bars long and load the wav files as samples, I guess the 1000 really isn't capable of that.

The deeper I get into the 1000, the more I realize it's basically useless for what I do. Samples drop out all the time when I'm recording, the MIDI sync is terrible... frustrating shit, should've bought a laptop instead.

Weird... I had a ride cymbal that was about 2 seconds long, I cut it a little shorter and nothing drops out now. I don't know if that will help you.

32 notes is not a skimpy polyphony at all

again, chop your samples smaller. it's bad for workflow to have such long samples used anyway, even if it is stuff you've recorded in.

chop each sample note for note and rerecord the melody in so every note drops from a different pad.

I very much doubt OS2 will change the polyphony limit.

If you're hoping to string together looped layers of guitar, bass, whatever, perhaps something more along the lines of the Peavy Grabber is for you. This thing used to be called Cycloops, then C-Loops, now Peavy owns it. It's great for realtime recording of loops, automatically recognizes tempo, allows you to cut various loop layers in and out.... I don't know of anything close to it. I've never used it personally but if I was to start looking into integrating live sampling into a show this would probably be where I'd start looking. Check the Loopers Delight page on it here: http://www.loopers-delight.com/tools/cy ... loops.html

If you do end up going the software route, definitely look into Ableton Live for that sort of work.

The MPC series really is mostly geared toward drum programming and as such doesn't seem to be what you're looking for. Lots of people use it for loop playback but generally it's just one or two loops with some drums sprinkled over.

Not trying to be an akai bootlicker, but to this date I've never had a timing issue with my 1k. The 2k was another story, it could get bogged down with lots of recorded knob tweaking on any synth pretty easy.

As both a master and a slave via MIDI Clock I've not once had the 1k let me down. I sequence 3 other pieces of gear with it as well as VSTs and I have Cubase clock it for recording drums, etc off the MPC.

When does the timing drift occur, and what exactly is playing at the time? How long are your sequences, are we talking looped-and-spliced sequences or one long sample/one long sequence here?

Just hoping to be of assistance.

-tank.

Yeah I figured out the problem, I had a 2 second ride cymbal being triggered like 20 times in 2 bars, so I guess they kept doubling and doubling maxing out the polyphony.

And the suggestion of chopping up what I've played is dumb to me, I'm going for a live sound and natural feel, something that would require tons more work to achieve if I programmed it, than if I could just lay it over as one sample. It turns out I can do that, so everything is good.

I figured out the MIDI sync thing too, turns out I don't know the MPC as well as I'd like to yet. Thanks for trying to help anyway.

Peace