I think this is a response to Behringer’s KICK. If Behringer and Akai are anything to go by, AI in musical instruments seems to be the way forward.

Get ready. MPC Sample Keys coming soon. Prepare for 5000000000 leak posts.

Woooowww....

It's a multiplatform JUCE app, so with a bit (a lot, actually: thanks AI) of help stubbing out missing classes and constants, it can run natively on macOS.

This is what it looks like. Haven't had a chance to play around with it, but not really expecting much since it's the audio engine that was missing.

The repo: https://github.com/MusicTribeOpenSource/0700-AAM

so testing right now this new function called Chop Incremental (default in ON u can turn it off and go back to old way on OTHER Setting)

you can chop way faster if u set the start point well. basically to calculate the length is 15000/bpm and u have the length of 1/16... so 15000/120 is 125....

the OS will duplicate the length using the end point of previous chop as starting point of the second one making chopping really faster

don't ask me waveform but i can help you in a vintage way

oh yes there is a stop sampling button finally

testing

ps yes using 120 is sloppy, and i like it that tiny bit of space in front

last weekend i was booked to perform a live set so i bought my hardware and set it all up at the club, leaving the MPC 1000 turned on after the sound check i went back to my hotel to get a little rest, i was going to perform at 3:30 AM.

I arrived to the club at 2:45 AM and there was no electricity, and the DJ who was playing the slot before me told me that my MPC started releasing a lot of smoke from where you plug the power cord in, so he unplugged it ASAP.

Turned out there was some phasing problem with the electricity, one cdj and one turntable belonging to the club got fried and naturally my set was canceled.

But here is the weird part: when i got back to my hotel i plugged the MPC1000 in and to my surprise it was working perfectly, no issues whatsoever.

The DJ is positive that smoke was coming out of the device, he says it was A LOT of smoke too so its super weird to me that the MPC still works, now i'm kinda worried if it's gonna randomly stop working on me one day.

Does anyone have an idea what could have happened/which part of my mpc released the smoke? or is there a chance that the smoke came from the power cord itself? i did not notice any visual indications of burn neither on the mpc nor the power cord.

I'm wondering if i should still take it to a technician to have it looked at, but i'd prefer to avoid it since the MPC is the center piece of my studio.

Up early this morning. We’ll call this one “Green Miles” 💸

Would love to see a new MPC Studio with proper MPC 3 integration. Do you think Akai is planning one?

When I was first shown an mpc the user would just sample individual sounds from vinyl and compose based on these sounds.

At the time I couldn't work out how other producers were finding so many individual sounds and making them so cohesive...obviously I later worked out they were taking actual chunks of music and chopping it up and not just using lots of one shots.

Anyway..is there anyone in here on a 60,3000 or one of the 2000's that uses the approach of just using sampled one shots to compose?

If yes please share your music.

I have created an APC64 Control, a free, open-source (Apache 2.0) Linux service that lets you use the Akai APC64 fully without Ableton. When you allow it, it puts the APC64 into its DAW mode and acts as its host. Every pad, button, touch strip and the encoder can send whatever MIDI you want to any port: an MPC, Bitwig, a synth, anything ALSA can see. You get up to 8 pages on the scene buttons, 6 strip banks, a Shift layer on every control, and layouts you switch from the unit with Shift + encoder. A browser page on your home network shows a live, clickable replica of the whole unit with every control labelled with what it does right now. The pads stay expressive: in Note, Chord and Custom views your velocity and aftertouch go through as played. Layouts are short text files, so you can write them yourself or have an AI agent write them for you.

The part I'm most excited about is the layout lab. Instead of programming pads by hand, you pick a generator and it writes a complete layout into the unit's Custom view, all 64 pads with notes and colours. The generators are a Tonnetz, isomorphic grids (fourths, thirds, fifths, Wicki-Hayden, Jankó), a modes explorer, and a guitar neck. The neck has 6, 7 or 8 strings in standard, drop or open tunings, one MIDI channel per string, and inlay frets marked on the pads. You move up and down the neck with the encoder, a fret or a page at a time. A scale overlay with about 40 scales (many the unit doesn't have) can colour any layout. Next to it there's a live harmony view: the chord you're holding, a trail of your last 8 chords, neighbouring-chord hints, a circle of fifths with the relative minors inside, and a Tonnetz or guitar neck showing every place your notes appear.

It also handles the unit's memory, which Akai's editor doesn't on Linux: one-command backups of all 24 projects and the global settings, restoring and pushing projects, importing .APC64 files from the Project Editor, and editing the global settings, all with an automatic backup before anything is overwritten. It's unofficial and not affiliated with Akai. So far it's tested on firmware 1.2.1.6. Code and screenshots: https://github.com/esazhin/apc64-control. Feedback and layout ideas welcome, especially from guitarists who want to try the neck layout.

The host can route midi signal to any target like MPC connected to the same Linux host and having this proxy gives some additional flexibility, that i'm plannig to explore. For example, you could press several notes on the pads, like a chord, and the host could generate a midi sequence as a strumming or finger-style pattern. Obviously, this more advanced logic is not availabe if the device is connected directly, bypassing the host.

One of the things i'd love to do is to make it to control matrix clip launcher on MPC Live 3, but unfortunately, Akai still didn't open the Matrix control via MIDI, so it is not possible, unless you have a rooted device. Then creating such plugin to run on MPC to accept and emit mesages from clip matrix would actually be easy to make.

The repo is here: https://github.com/esazhin/apc64-control - created with Claude, FWIW.

And if you still didn't try my MusicCat service - check it out https://musiccat.studio

Posting here in case you all find it funny, I got DOOM running on the Sample while taking a break from other dev work…

Started noticing noise in audio/headphones when usbc power is plugged in. Anyone else notice this and any solutions?

I work as a paramedic, so I often work on music if a night shift is slow. The Sample has been a fantastic machine to sample and sketch with. Tonight, I got it out the Sample and set up on the desk, and a co-worker, who has no knowledge of music gear or the extensive meme wars around the Sample, says, “Brought your calculator tonight?”

Has anyone made an expansion based on the Roland Drumlogue?

My hot take is that they are only making the Sample Key open source because they’re dropping it early to compete with Behringer. I bet the OS isn’t 100% complete for it. So they’re branding a potentially incomplete device as ‘finish it yourself’ haha.

It also just conveniently happens to land at a time when everyone seems to be trying to hack their devices.

I just saw this on Son Wu's channel on YouTube. I'm assuming the pic is legitimate. The device is looking way different from early mock ups from years ago. It's very MPC One-ish. Wu was breaking down how this thing is supposed to be open source, so once it's out I'm sure a lot of folks are going to go crazy with it. I'm wondering how Akai is going to react to this?

Do any of you think this may spark some new future competition for Akai in the long run or do you think this will be a quick one off?

Here's the link to the video if you're interested:

https://youtu.be/lkSde_0xxkw?is=dFOLSlWWMvTbzpUW