The Ultimate Dawless Centerpiece? // Problems, Issues and Thoughts on MPC 2.10

hezekiah officially made the ultimate dallas centerpiece welcome back to the channel today we're talking about the mpc updates specifically the 2.10 update that happened a few weeks ago memes and i have been super busy over the past few weeks with projects so i have had a little time to actually make a video on this even though i've been super excited about the update because it has brought in some things that i never thought was actually going to happen with the mpc one with some pros and cons so it's not all roses unfortunately there is some problems that i've found and some trade-offs with the audio interface type of stuff let me back it up i got the mpc one back in january of 2020 it was my first mpc purchase it was also before the 2.8 update dropped which revolutionized my dallas midi experience with the 2.8 update one single usb connection could be utilized to connect all of my usb midi enabled gear however my main wish has always been for the mpc one to have more audio outputs i enjoy using outboard gear compressors equalizers and all that and analog summing when i'm finishing my productions so the dream really has been to be able to plug essentially one usb cable into the mpc one or live or live two or something like that and have all of my gear automatically set up both on the audio side and on the midi side now obviously the midi side happened a little over a year ago with 2.8 fast forward to july of 2021 and now we have audio interface support and you would think that all of your prayers have been answered and it's the perfect solution unfortunately it's not so caveat number one it does not support all devices it's specifically class compliant audio device support and it needs to specifically support the linux version of that in my particular case motu interfaces i was really excited to plug in a avb type of setup and be able to send audio tracks essentially over ethernet because that's how the moto avb stuff works unfortunately motu gear does not support the linux variety of class compliance it's only i think mac and windows or something like that it is class compliant but a subsection of it so that unfortunately does not work so all those really cool moto interfaces are out of the picture i own a 828es and i also own a 24 24 ao again i like to sum things outside the box so i send 24 channels to a v32 burl vancouver summing box and i also have a suite of eqs and compressors and stuff that i really enjoy using in the analog domain so it would have been amazing if i could just plug in a usb cable have all my midi to all my gear and then also have audio being sent into the avb digitally that would have been amazing however it just does not work so no mo to support was a bummer soon actually i try it with some other audio interfaces that i own first up on the list was my focusrite scarlett 18i20 second gen it did not work at first however quick firmware update and it was good to go i was able to select the 32 channel mode and the npc was sending audio but then as i was playing on the pads i noticed just a hint of delay and nothing massive a tiny bit of delay that i was noticing i was like huh is this introducing another layer of delay which would make sense since it is technically an audio driver that's being put on top of the environment that's already existing with the mpc there's the mpc layer and i'm sure that the audio stuff is low level built coded into it so if you add a driver on top of that you're going to have some extra layer of delay that's being added to be able to send the audio through a new set of protocols and all that that's exactly what happens on a computer and there's a reason why they have like sample buffer size and then delay compensation you know like 256 sample buffer or 512. you know those things are very typical for our actual computer workstations digital audio workstations it's just a reality of the fact that drivers have to sit on top of a layer of software to communicate back and forth to make that stuff work so naturally the npc would basically be doing the same thing right unfortunately there is no information or panel to tell you what's happening with it as in how many samples or what type of millisecond delay is occurring with it so i decided to jump into ableton and do some testing real quick if you're enjoying this video make sure to hit the like button it helps out the channel and helps spread it to other people that may enjoy this type of content so here's what i did i connected the mpc one via lan cable into my network and enabled ableton link to sync things up i then recorded five takes of the mpc one native output into ableton live to measure the overall initial latency with my setup this was about one millisecond latency which i'm pretty sure is ableton link's own variants on the network clock i then took the scarlett 18 i20 and performed the same test but with the mpc one sending audio through the scarlet on average it appeared to be roughly 10 milliseconds of latency being introduced into the signal again the only thing that changed was the scarlet interface for the audio instead of the mpc one's own native outputs then i took a steinberg ur 22 mark 2 interface and performed the exact same test in ableton i did this because i was curious if it was a focusrite driver issue causing latency slightly better results roughly eight milliseconds of latency being introduced so it appears the manufacturer's driver support could possibly influence it a bit but it is far from the sub one millisecond output of the native npc one and i should note ableton link is not sample accurate however after five takes you can definitely see how much variance is being introduced into the recordings which appears to be roughly one millisecond so what does that mean in the real world like is that gonna affect your productions i will say if you are exclusively using the npc and you just want to output eight or 16 tracks into a summing mixer or uh some outboard gear and they're always going to be coming out of the mpc one no external gear then it's not really going to make a big difference to you it could make a difference if you're trying to monitor sounds like say you have a singer who's trying to hear playback through the mpc one it's being monitored through the output of this driver they will absolutely hear a delay in their headphones singers can usually detect like anywhere from six to three to six milliseconds of delay because they're hearing themselves as they sing so it's zero millisecond delay and then three to six milliseconds can sound like a flam or a flange type of effect so it's something to consider if you're thinking oh i could use a interface like this you know use the the phantom power and then monitor it through an npc to have those performances and have them here headphones and all that it's not to be as perfect of a solution as you might think you can get around it with live monitoring on certain devices uh i think the scarlet can do that i know the ur 22 can so there is certain audio interfaces that get around that because even on stuff like ableton you're going to have delay that you hear what i could see being an issue is if you have say a drum machine separate to the npc and you maybe you have some samples that are like rhythmic in nature not necessarily drums specifically but like say some sort of arpeggio type of thing that you want like really locked in time pretty sure you're gonna have a discrepancy and timing right there six to eight milliseconds for a drummer usually can detect those differences things might feel a little late not dramatically i'm not saying it's gonna be like oh that's clearly late it's more like a a thing that you feel where you're like something off that you listen to you're like no it doesn't sound off but then you're like i think something's off because the feel so again if you have a drum machine off to the side and you have some arpeggio that's super tight timed it could affect that so when i saw 2.10 come out i thought man i think this could possibly be the solution where i just set up an audio interface permanently and all the gear is like plugged in a certain way and it's like good to go and i never have to change it unfortunately i don't think that's gonna be the case for me i think i'm gonna stick with my current setup where the npc is essentially triggering a few samples but the majority of my stuff is still being routed through a mixing board which then has the ability to either send to a moto interface or gets routed to my brol summing mixer that setup currently has been working really well for me because also i do like to switch out pieces of gear a lot and sometimes i like to use the digi tag or the octatrack and not because i think the mpc is not as good clearly the npc is amazing for a dollar's production but sometimes you get different perspectives with different gear one thing that i really wish the mpc one live and live two had is an actual preamp with phantom power there's a lot of times where i'd like to hook up a phantom powered microphone and i have to go through some hoops to get that to work set up a preamp and then jack it into the the line levels and all that with the class compliance i can now just bring a ur 22 mark ii i don't even need power i could just plug it in directly with the usb cable and then i have phantom power and i can bring a microphone and start doing some tracking so that's actually a really nice mobile solution for like a preamp ultimately though i still think something like the mpc x is the best solution for a permanent installation for an npc i think the mpc one is amazing i really like it and i think the live two is amazing as well the live two is kind of like the sweet spot for me but if i did want to set up a permanent solution with an npc installation the x is still king in that sense and i don't own the x and i don't own the akai force so i can't speak about the akai force i know they've been doing updates but it seems like the npc one live live 2 and x get the bulk of the updates that's what it seems like outside of the audio interface support excitement 2.10 added a ton of useful effects and synthesizers to the system it honestly rounded out the platform from a production point of view however in an effort to keep this video under 20 minutes i will not be deep diving into all the new goodies we'll be saving that for future videos and jams oh one thing that they finally added that i was just shocked that did not exist with the mpc one before when you go into controller mode and you plug this into your computer it finally mounts the sd card if you want to access what was on the sd card you had to eject it put it into a separate card reader and plug it into the computer and that way you could transfer your projects back and forth to like the mpc software and that was just an immediate turn off i was like all right i'm gonna have to do what no i'm not doing that they finally fixed that so thank you akai for i mean these were two of the major things i wanted uh i wanted to be able to plug in an audio interface and i wanted the sd card to show up when i go into controller mode so i didn't have to do some hoops jumping it actually makes more interested to use the software side now that the sd card is super simple to mount and like load up a project i might try that another thing i want to point out is that all these updates have been free i bought this in uh january 2020 and it's gone from good feature set to better feature set to now amazing feature set and i haven't spent more money specifically on the mpc one so i'm really curious to see where this goes and if maybe are they going to do an mpc3 and are they going to support it on these platforms or is that going to be something new hardware stuff down the road one limitation that already kind of exists right now is how much cpu power there is to these platforms i believe the mpc one live live 2 and x all share the same cpu and ram and all that it's also a limitation for vsts as well because i i'm pretty sure that this is a highly tuned probably arm-based processor that has its limits as you can clearly see when as soon as you start loading up some plug-ins you can see the cpu usage jump to like 40-50 percent so in terms of future expandability yeah that could be a problem and if akai ever decided to support vsts and their hardware i'm pretty sure cpu power and architecture would be their first major hurdle the reason why i bring this up is one of the big competitors is the machine plus machine from native instruments back when machine first came out i bought it really enjoyed it i used to use that quite a bit uh that was literally machine 1.0 and it's evolved considerably since then so maybe the future i might pick up the machine standalone and give it a shot and see how it fits into the studio environment in my workflow productions as it is right now the npc has been checking all the boxes with each update i'm just more excited to use the mpc platform i do want to point out though that the mpc platform is technically a computer and with computers come bugs there's clearly a list of issues that have happened with each update and if you go and look at the forums you'll see a lot of people saying oh this is happening now my projects are crashing basically a bunch of stuff where if you're in the middle of a project don't update your gear straight up take it from me do not update your software your gear section it off until you've finished a mission critical project because more often than not updates break things i used to always stay at least one operating system behind when i was on mac notoriously every single mac update would break half my plugins and make logic not work the same as it was in the past and i'd have to wait six months for that stuff to be fixed on that particular operating system update so take it from me don't update things if you are in the middle of a project that needs to be finished especially if you're being paid for that project and that is all i have to say about this current topic at the moment i'm looking forward to making more music with memes on the mvc and experimenting with the the 2.10 updates uh we're also in the middle of making a sample pack that is almost done very excited about that uh you can visit tefemes.com to potentially sign up for something that's where it will be eventually as of this video right now it's not done but it's getting there real close so if you guys are interested in vocal phrases from memes that's going to be on tiffanymemes.com so check that out and yeah thank you very much for watching hitting the like button helps the channel and uh we'll see you for another video real soon deuces

Channel: Tefty & Meems

Views: 32,431

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Id: 6VjJpb-A2Wg

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021