#21

If you want to play a kit, you have to load it onto ram. Then if you decide not to use it in your beat, you have to go delete all of its samples from the project sample pool one by one.

You can audition single samples in the file browser as far as I remember but I don’t know about kits.

At present, the MPC Live and X are not really suitable if your goal is external sequencing. All MIDI inputs are rechannelized to go to the currently selected track, so they are in essence monotimbral when it comes to external MIDI. This is supposed to change in a future software updated, and while Akai has over-delivered on new functionality in the MPCs, you should probably never buy a product based on promises of future features…

I quite like the internal sequencer. Some things are fiddly. It works OK for my uses, even if I move a little slower on it than e.g. Live’s MIDI editor.

Other than that, I really like my Live. Yes, the E-mu Ultra can do so much more and sounds very good, but the Live is so approachable and I’ve really taken to the layering approach it encourages.

#22

Ughhhhh this is another thing that drove me insane with the Live: all of that midi input potential, nothing to do with it. Why oh why do they give you so many midi input options if you can only control the currently selected channel?

Something else that drove me crazy–although it looks like it’s fixed now–is that you couldn’t use external midi controllers to control anything in the new MPCs except for note on/off and velocity. Which meant that you couldn’t use an external knobby controller to sweep the cutoff of a sample or whatever. Apparently that’s been fixed…

#23

The rechannelize is often what you want. If you connect a keyboard and want to build up tracks using it, it’s exactly right. But you ought to be able to switch it off.