Did Akai fix the "cons"? MPC LIVE II vs MPC ONE // Speaker test, review and 2.8 tutorial

hi in this video I'll take a look at three things how MPC live to compares to the original MPC live and NBC one how could its speakers are and then what's new in MPC version 2.8 in particular in light of the cons in my comprehensive NPC version 2.7 tutorial video in order to keep this video as concise as possible I won't repeat that tutorial I'll link to it below it applies to all three devices up to MPC version 2.7 and I'll talk about what's new in 2.8 here with that said let's get started let's start with a comparison so the biggest feature in MPC live to you and I mean that quite literally is the built-in speakers I shined a light into the grille here and you can see two speakers on each side that seem to be in different angles the ones in the corners pointing in a 45 degree more or less up and the ones further in pointing forwards I didn't open it up but I guess the center portion is responsible for the bass because you can definitely feel the bass when you crank it up I'll show you the results of a speaker test in a bit let's take a deeper look at the differences between these three obviously the price which is always subject to change $700 for the MPC one $1200 for live two and live mark one is $1,000 if you can get one new and about 800 to 900 used according to reverb the launch of this may drive it even lower the next big difference between the three is that MPC live and live mark 2 have an internal battery as you can see they're not plugged into anything and both can be expanded with an SSD plugged in the bottom whereas MPC one does not have an internal battery nor can it be expanded with a big solid-state drive that said you can expand the storage of all three with an SD card or USB Drive in terms of existing internal storage MPC live and live to have an internal drive with 16 gigabytes of storage whereas MPC one has only 4 gigabytes of internal storage in practical terms since 4 gigabytes and even 16 gigabytes is probably not enough for the samples we all hoard either an SSD or SD or USB Drive is a must anyway so I don't think that the internal storage is a big deal in terms of controls let's start with what's identical all three have a seven-inch touchscreen and 16 pressure and velocity sensitive pads with the pads on the MPC one obviously smaller whether or not that's an issue for you is a matter of individual preference I'm not that much of a finger drummer and I'm fine with the small pads on the MPC one in terms of actual physical buttons MPC one is still king of the hill with 31 buttons yes I counted them live 2 is a close second with 27 and then live one and comes last with 22 however and again a matter of personal preference I prefer the buttons on the lives to those on one now that said the extra buttons on one are quite useful here's a little feature request it would be nice if you could customize the buttons for example in a project that doesn't use multiple sequences next sequence is kind of redundant so it would be nice if I could assign that to something else or maybe swapped XY effects from shift function to regular function I really like the program edit button here there's no program edit button on live - obviously you can always access it through the menu or with shift to reach the right screen and in the case of program edit it's this one so you get used to it but this is more convenient let's take a look at connectivity first what they have in common all three have to master outputs and two inputs though MPC one only has quarter inch inputs and MPC live and live mark to have phono inputs though they share the same actual internal bus you need to choose whether you want to use line or phone out on each however live and live to have four additional quarter-inch outputs that you can route to external processing or effects or a cue live mark one has 3.5 millimeter headphone outputs and MPC 1 has them up front there's a quarter inch output for headphones here live 2 has a speaker on/off switch obviously relevant only for it because it's the only one with a speaker all three have an SD card slot here on the lives it's in the back on one it's in the front master out level control on the back on NPC 1 and MPC live on live mark it's this knob over here then CV and gate are only supported on NPC 1 and live - not on the original live there are four outputs here but these are CV gate pairs if you get a splitter cable a TRS style splitter cable you can get to CVS out of each of these outputs then on to MIDI only one midian and one midi out on NPC one two pairs on live and live mark to the inputs didn't make much sense until version 2.8 but now that you can plug in a lot of MIDI devices two inputs are certainly nice to have you can connect the NPC's to your computer using the USB type B jacks this is USB - these are USB 3 which means faster data transfer and access to the internal SSD drive here in the bottom which you can mount on to your computer both have USB type a jacks to connect MIDI controllers storage and so on only one here two here which is obviously more convenient though you can connect a powered hub here and connect as many devices as you want with version 2 point 8 then finally in terms of network connectivity Ethernet link on NPC 1 and live mark 2 which doesn't exist on the original live a connectivity difference you won't see on the back is that live and live to both support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth where as NPC 1 has neither its Ethernet only let's take a look at some other physical differences in terms of size you can pretty much see for yourself as I mentioned earlier all three share the same size touch screen and the pads here are smaller overall I find that when using the NPC 1 I'm pretty much always facing forwards whereas there's a slight left-to-right motion on the lives however since the screen on NPC one is slightly farther away from you if you're sitting down low the perception is that lives screen is bigger while the form factor again as a matter of personal taste personally I like the aesthetics of NPC 1 more but ultimately because the touch screen does get a lot of use in the NPC workflow closer is better a final word on size you shouldn't forget weight NPC 1 is the lightest of the three coming in at 2.1 kilos or four point seven pounds live one is 2.7 kilos or point nine pounds and live - is 3.4 kilos or 7.45 pounds so yes this is portable doesn't require power can work on a battery but it is pretty heavy all three share the same Ram storage two gigabytes of RAM as of the current firmware version 2.8 you can't stream audio from the hard drive if we look at the competitive landscape there are quite a few samplers that only have 64 megabytes of sample space which is a small fraction of this however there are others like deluge black box and octatrack which support streaming from SD cards nope I have hinted this feature is probably coming so it's more matter of when not if the NPC product line supports streaming personally I think 2 gigabytes is a lot to work with another difference both lives support Ableton Live control MPC one does not okay let's talk about the speaker there's no way that I can convey to you exactly how this sounds if you imagine a sound bar around this size you'll be able to start imagining what this sounds like is it as good studio monitors probably not but it does have a fun pumping bass and it can get too loud for comfort meaning that you don't need to crank it up to get a feel for what you're creating as of the making of this video Akai hasn't shared any specs about these speakers and I don't have an anechoic chamber at home so I can't test exactly how flat or what the frequency response of the speakers is but I took live 2 out to my backyard to measure it and the reason this works well is because the enemy of proper acoustic measurement walls don't exist here of course there are other enemies here like the neighbors barking dog or birds which is why it's always a good idea to take a few measurements and please take all this with a grain of salt obviously this is no professional way to measure speakers it seems like they start kicking in at about 70 Hertz and if you take a middle-level between the peaks and valleys it doesn't stray too far from the plus -5 dB either way until about 10 K then it holds up at a lower level until it drops off completely at about 16 K now this is in my backyard I made a video about measuring your room your room with its reflections and modes is probably much worse than this now if we set aside the numbers for a second like I said it sounds like a good portable speaker which most of us casually listen to which is great but obviously it doesn't compare to proper studio monitors one last crude test I'll point my mic at the speaker [Music] [Music] okay so those are the differences now to complete the picture let's take a look at what's new in version two point eight because it seems like I have addressed many though not all the feature requests people have been asking for a while before I move on to the big one which is multi MIDI I just want to talk a bit about a few of the small ones that really bugged me in previous firmwares all of them were cons in my book and Akai knocked them out quite nicely first a super handy shortcut for changing tracks so up until now you had to press the track somewhere on screen and then either turn the knob or press and tap now you just hold main and you can choose the track either on screen or using the pads which is an awesome shortcut the next thing that really bugged me was that you couldn't know what the cue links did now that may seem trivial but actually the cue links have a lot of multiple modes five of them actually so they can be in project mode and do different things program pantsing pad parameters or based on whatever is going on screen they fixed that with a simple overlay once you touch a cue link you can see what it does now these cuelinks represent four out of a group of 16 cue links you can hold the cue link and then page through the different options now if I may be so bold as to ask for a consistent behavior along the grid of 4x4 cue links so currently as you press this button you move either left to right on the 4x4 grid which makes a lot of sense if it's aligned in columns but if you're on a page that happens to be aligned in rows for example like the pad parameter then tapping here moves on to the next one in an upward direction as you can see here so now these four killings control these four parameters it would be great if they would just move left to right consistently the next of my cons and I'm sure for others obviously as well that Akai fixed was that pad perform mode was its own thing you'd go into the menu you define perform here somewhere and then it would work only as long as you were in it if you're a few other pages that can playing notes that wouldn't carry on to those pages this meant that you had to do a lot of transposing with banks if you were in a drum kit or in a melodic program that's in the past now now it really works nicely you just enter pad perform mode which is right here not on the main menu then you choose how you want the pads to behave chromatic or chord mode notes all the goodies in Pat perform mode only now it works in a few other places as well if you're new to MPC with a version 2.8 you'll have no idea what I'm talking about and that's a good thing another thing I mentioned wasn't so hot in 2.7 and earlier was the time stretch algorithm so time stretches we've got a tune this is the original tempo and you slow it down obviously the more you slow it down harder it is to keep it consistent without using too much CPU anyway so slow down to say this right here the choppiness there this is the old algorithm if we go into menu settings and change it to the new one Pro 10 it is quite a bit better you can still hear choppiness but less time [Music] now this supposedly does take up more CPU power I didn't stress test this this is one clip about 10% okay jump here and not very different 9 to 10 again this is just one clip so potentially more clips will slow it down more but it's not like it's a major head another neat and helpful function added to NPC 2.8 is retrospective record basically like Ableton lives capture function meaning that your MPC remembers what you play even if you didn't hit record and if you come up with something you like you just hit shift record and you can bring that into the active track so let's see how this works I'll get into the sequencer here hit play and let's say fooling around like this and maybe this but I didn't hit record very simple just hit shift record and that gets committed onto the timeline [Music] yet another fun one you can now program your own custom progressions into pads to do that just play the chords in the track which we just happen to already do then go back into main hit the pencil tap convert to progression you can rename it let's just leave it at progression twenty-eight you can preview the chords in the progression move the court to there are a bunch of other options let's just hit do it and if we go to pad perform go to progressions we can then select progression 28 this has been transposed but those are our chords in there of course available on the pads as well and you can obviously sequence more than just two chords there are other small features I won't cover in this video like copying pads between programs assigning custom MIDI notes to specific pads and global automation and timing correct functions let's go ahead and look at the big one which is updates to NPCs MIDI capabilities now in the past versions of the MPC firmware you could sequence external MIDI and CV gear from the MPC but if you connected controllers or synths into the MPC they could only control the active track that has now changed along with a few other things but the core idea is that you can now connect multiple devices that can send MIDI into MPC assign each controller to a different track to play the internal synth or sample based instruments or external instruments since I already showed how to sequence external gear in my previous video I'll keep things simple and control the internal synths let's take a look at this setup I've got micro lab here connected into one USB port in the back and the noodler it's a funky kind of generative a sequencer connected to the other USB port both powered by the MPC if I had additional USB devices I could use a powered USB hub to connect them and of course I could also use npcs 5 pin midi inputs in the back if i go in to the settings menu and look at the midi sync option right there are a bunch of options here got a midi sync you can see that it's already identified the oratorio micro lab MIDI 1 and named it by the way over USB which is a nice benefit of connecting things over USB MPC 1 & 2 are the 5 pin reading inputs and then noodler has for us being MIDI ports each with up to 16 channels that's overkill for what we need for this setup I'll just be using MIDI port 1 and multiple channels on that MIDI port if you connect devices into the MIDI ports you could rename them here as well anyway if you look at the options for incoming gear track is the basic option which enables receiving notes from these control will let you use their knobs to control parameters within MPC as long as you mini learn those parameters and then master enables a controller to control MPC live the old way meaning the active track that's on the input on output side again you can send out notes and I'll be syncing noodler to NPCs clock so I activated sync for all of Noodlers ports and I think that's almost it obviously I'm sending MIDI clock out to noodler so that's the overall setup to get these guys talking then I retract my track basis you have to tell each track which MIDI device and which MIDI channel to listen to now you can see that if you click this little eye over here you can see which MIDI input I'm listening to and which channel it's a bit small but it's workable that's the mini port and this is the MIDI channel I prefer the overview in track view so I've got a pad on track to listening to MIDI channel to which my collab is configured to if I go to track one you won't hear anything because my collab is set to send out MIDI on channel two but we can easily move it to channel one then I've got noodler MIDI coming in on here Luther won't work unless I have clock working because I've slaved it anyway track five is my drums let's unit for now hit play so noodler can receive clock then I'm going to track for you and we're not hearing anything because I didn't arm this track so this is information sent from Euler MIDI port 1 to track 3 then track 4 is this one I can activate it now that I've got clock so this is the second pattern you can by the way are multiple tracks by hitting shift arm for the tracks that you want to listen to incoming midi and another new feature in 2.8 lets you arm multiple tracks without holding shift you need to change that in the settings then the final important piece of information is the options here there are four options for each MIDI track auto merge off and in keep it on auto here off means that only events that are already recorded or heard in means that incoming midi plays whether the track is armed or not and recorded events aren't heard auto means that you hear incoming notes when the track is are and the recorded notes when the track isn't armed and merge is where you hear both incoming and recorded notes anyway the end result of all this is that NPC can now be the brain of a setup that not only tells other instruments what to do but also listens and responds which means you can use it as a sound module like we did here with the various MIDI channels and even as a MIDI looper so let's for example go into Europe one track hit play so we've got clock going this is active I could always hit overdub to start entering these notes in and I'll make a perfect loop here and then stop this okay maybe then go to a second track record this then yeah keep on going and maybe that's unmute my drums I didn't want to automate that by the way based on you can practice a bit and just decide to record and that's basically how you use the NPC as a live looper both for internal instruments and external ones and of course I could keep going and say and with the pads not forget to choose a channel to [Music] [Music] I just missed that meeting off event let's hope this fixes itself the next loop around [Music] so it worked but it would be a good idea to trim those notes later on or watch for overlapping notes when you create hoops so with all these new features and a killing off most of my cons what's left to complain about well there are still only two audio inputs on all three devices so it would be nice if AK I could support expanding those with an external audio interface over USB so that once you build this as a brain of a set up you could use it to apply effects say to multiple instruments or record and track multiple instruments live into audio tracks another thing that would be nice to have is the concept of scenes like Ableton Live and machine and there's no arranger the work I has hinted that's coming finally something that I don't miss much but I know a lot of people do is the ability to stream large samples from the hard drive beyond that on the pro side the MPC platform just keeps getting better the MPC one is an amazing value at seven hundred dollars and now you have a couple more options either a used MPC live mark one for portability without CV control and obviously no speaker or the MPC live to with the best of both worlds a speaker that isn't shabby at all portability cv/gate outputs almost as many buttons as NPC one but of course it comes at a price so that's pretty much it for the comparison between MVC live to one and MVC one if you liked the insight in this video consider checking out my ever expanding book of electronic music ideas tips and tricks available to the people who support this channel on patreon hit like if this was useful don't forget to ring the bell after subscribing to make sure you don't miss the next one feel free to ask me anything in the comment section below thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: loopop

Views: 223,150

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Id: eRJ4EhxO_D4

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/im_onlyhere2talkshit]

Really impressed with the 2.8 update. Pretty big deal if you work within that space. That MPC Live 2 tho, wtf? A sound bar? That’s just stupid. I would have taken a couple XLR inputs with a guitar jack on the front.

[u/kidkolumbo]

I actually saw a post on facebook of all places about the MPC Live II, and I'm surprised I didn't see anything about it here. If the MPC One had more outs and a more robust acoustic instrument selection, I would've went with it instead of my MC101 I believe.

[u/futuresynthesizer]

Not a major update, but probably for the ones who do not own ONE nor LIVE mk1.

Budget wise, second-hand MPC live mk1 would be the best bet for the most Drum Machine musicians.

If money is no problem, then mk ii :)

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This with Behringer Monopoly would be fuuuuun :)

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I wish they come up with, Cubase-like, daw arranger/sequencer. Like... so you can actually roughly finish a whole song from bird's eye view, since it also has multi-midi I/O enabled.

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Akai should really expand their game, start a side-platform, such as sample-clearing company that lists all royalty free music in HD from Public Domain (maybe some exclusives to AKAI users), and also some sampling-allowed music list with pricing...

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In my country, sample clearing is extremely hard and simply there are hardly none who does it for you. The main reason of my purchase of 2XL back in the days was to sample vinyls but... nowadays, it gets harder to clear... (just my hope...)

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mkii looks bulky too! (bigger than it looks)