The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

Speakers and audio

Akai MPC

6owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
3/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and sound; criticized for ease of use.

What people wrote

Neutral
I looked and went, "WTF is that? Looks like a record cutting machine" Scrolled down WTAF I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen. The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones. TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple. I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it. "God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist. Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
Likes it
Another big benefit of these older devices is customizability and repairability. I am working to refurbish an MPC1000 right now (drum machine) and the fact that it is repairable at all was a big factor in choosing to sell a newer, nicer device in favor of an older one that wasn't fully working. Not everything can be treated that way, like a phone or a laptop I would prefer to be no more than 5 years old. But so many things don't need to be terribly modern in order to work well.
Recommends it
Strange, I went from buying an MPC One+ to making full beats within a month, way, way faster than I did learning Ableton. I found it very easy to learn from watching a youtube video series. Are you a sample based musician? That what it was designed around. Perfect for hipho. The OS does feel out of date, this current version of MPC OS came out when iPhone 6 was out, and there has long been talk of an MPC 3.0 upgrade coming soon. So it's hard to judge it entirely given its age. A huge part of it is that many serious professional musicians use this as a daily driver for production and they are VERY set on workflow patterns dating to the 90s. So reorganizing stuff would come with big customer pushback. Learning the MPC workflow and developing our own templates+flows is really critical to understanding it. Your experience with it is seemingly quite shallow but a bit understandable. > Main should really be called "editor" and "menu" should be called "main." Not really, Main is the mainscreen like your primary app view. Menu is like the start menu or a sidebar in a webapp. Editor would be confusing because there's the midi screen. And you dont edit anything besides track names. > No page has both save and load on it. Save is actually a disk so it's not clear if it saves or loads. "Load" is actually labelled "browser." "Browser" is basically "sample browser", which was it's primary purpose. Then there's shortcuts you use for your projects directory. Or you load projects screen on bo
Likes it
> I can't fathom how he thinks it's so intuitive. It's taken me months and years and lots of manual-reading, 3rd party manuals and numerous videos to understand what is basically just a daw. I bought an MPC 1 about 3 weeks into covid lockdown (strange memories). But I found that it was awesome for laying down simple and pretty awesome sounding beats, compared to my Logic + Launchpad setup. I have Ableton too but have never gotten around to learning it. On MPC, I ramped up pretty quickly on simple beats -- especially once I figured out I had to stop treating it like a DAW. The record-while-looping is fantastic, and the MPC sample kits are nearly "production ready" (I mean, from my hobbyist perspective, who also owns a zillion drum libraries which never sound as good as in the demo tracks). Over a couple of months I laid down 100 projects, and some turned out not terrible. A lot of fun. So in that sense it was definitely intuitive. On the other hand , I found it excruciating when I wanted to learn deeper features. The MPC Bible is not a fun read. And the whole business of copying sequences never really fit me, compared to in logic being able to quick copy different pieces of tracks around and tweak and go back and edit curves, etc. I think it must be that to really make the most out of MPC, your mindset has to be: lay something down, commit, and move on. I'm inspired to pick it up again though. It's a lot of fun every time I do.
Doesn’t like it
I picked up an MPC X for a great deal some years ago but I find that using it feels like using a limited DAW instead of inspiring much creativity. As an engineer as well, I always have the urge to try to preserve and record my noodling with the ability to recreate it and perhaps change out synths, so the MPC works decently well as a midi and CV hub / router that can record, but I can’t say I’ve ever had tons of fun with it. That’s probably more on me for never finishing the MPC Bible ebooks. On the other hand, the Linnstrument is fantastic for bringing out creative ideas, and it plays well with the many MPE instruments available for iPads. Add in an iConnectivity interface that can simultaneously hook up with a laptop to record everything including the resulting audio and that’s a powerful machine. My only regret in modern music creation is now that I can afford all the fun toys and now that we have nearly limitless potential to create any sound we could never imagine, I don’t have nearly as much time as when I was a kid with an Alesis Ion and a pirated copy of Reason, so I end up creating a quarter of the music with 20x more gear :/
Doesn’t like it
I don't get the point of this. When I drop all my files in my OneDrive folder, there's no confusion on what I'm getting. I'm getting a fully managed backup solution. I'm not getting complete control, or the ability to do strange superuser stuff. I have no interest in managing my own backup servers, I have no interest in installing my own sync up tools, I want a multi-billion dollar company to run it. There's no way to get around it, either. Even if you want to roll your own, you're still ultimately using AWS or another cloud provider. I make music, and being able to make a song on my iPad, drop it in one drive folder is amazing. Even better, since I make a ton of sampled music, I can find cool samples and use them on my iPad within seconds. If you have any awareness of how difficult loading new samples is on an MPC you'll respect how great this is. This is like arguing your Ford Fiesta can't go off-road.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
BTW I'm a 2000/1000/One owner but I really want that 3000 someday. I'm hoping a local elderly person who only used it to get to church and the grocery store puts it up for sale some day. Ironically since the days when I bought into the MPC I have moved toward tracking which requires nothing but a shitty laptop.