Yea, good to know from another’s perspective, @Garrett mentioned his experience was a bit negative and he sold it, while you had a positive experience and you are keeping it. I demoed the MPC500 from a local seller and I found it surprisingly intuitive( a certain mental zoning in factor happens when you use dedicated hardware). The sampling is spot on, takes line in from your phone or a mic with a toggle switch and the sample extract feature is quick for its design, the jog dial and cursor keys are side by side and one hand operation is very easy. Modes are quickly memorized as pressing the mode button and then one of the designated pads. Master and Record gain have front knobs, and even if the pads are not the best from Akai it’s durable enough. Metronome and click track can be configured to play during record or play and record both and the sound is changeable, 4 banks of 48 samples with bank buttons right below the jog dial. Onboard FX is nice too, delay, chorus, tremolo, flanger, phaser and eq and compression. Btw sidechaining can be done with an outboard compressor unit and resampled back. It’s also a workflow thing, just like Renoise, MPC is also unique. Getting an outboard compressor with an MPC 500/2500/4000/5000 unit and some keys and vinyl and guitar with FX and drum machines and a mic look like a true and tried setup that would make you really busy than just seem to be busy.
I think a lot of folks might have had better expectations from this product and quite a few units turned out to be buggy, but judging by the feature set it’s actually a very powerful sampler and sequencer. Some say it’s for entry level users or beginners but then when I look at MPX ( no sequencer, does not run on batteries, calls it self portable) or Electribe (real time record also quantizes to 16 step grid which is totally pointless for beats) or SP 404 (very low polyphony, non velocity pads, lack of outputs, similar cryptic screens for editing using markers for truncate) and other similar gear they all would be basic samplers missing lot of features where even the ‘basic’ MPC 500 does built in, and yea it runs on battery so the value is worth it, possibly even more so since it’s a discontinued product these days. Another thing I read is that the screen is very small and you do not have waveform display etc but personally since I play and record everything unquantized and real time, step record unlike in Renoise where it’s awesome is something I don’t quite fancy on hardware anyways, since it’s no point for beats becos mine ain’t quantized (or very light amounts on target parts mostly for effect), no way you can step sequence your grooves for that kind of a swing, and melodies- sampling and resampling the pattern takes care of it, live guitar input and keyboard input takes care of it. You could record the performance on a single Pad just like you would load it from a sample cd or a vinyl. I don’t even imagine myself doing any kind of editing both midi and audio regardless of the screen size. For midi events a simple erase feature of holding the respective pad down while holding an erase button is all I need and most products have that already. Remember the time when musicians used to record takes till they get the perfect one and when auto tune was not invented? That is more my style and it saves so much time and it keeps your musicianship and your ears on its toes striving to be a better musician than a better post production editor.
The MPX 16 from Akai does not have a sequencer, does not run on batteries and is nowhere an MPC beyond the sampling on SD card. It almost looks like a dumbed down MPC500, yet that is the latest product from them(!). While CF cards work and are still available a simple upgrade for a 500 to sd cards and other minor updates would see immense market value if samplers still have any future beyond users shelling out 2000 dollars for a bling machine just to record stuff and play it back.
I think it would be a good purchase based on all the feedback.