AKAI Professional MPX8

Not bad as my first Sample Player

I bought this as I needed something to play samples during a gig. The allocation of sample to pads is easy once you get used to it. The system worked good for what I needed

PROS:

- Good Sound

- Did what I needed it to do

- You can stop a sample which is useful

CONS:

- When I hit a pad hard, somethings a nearby pad would activate

- You may need to work with your sound engineer to get a great quality output

- Only 8 samples allowed, would be nice to have pages of samples, e.g. Page 1 or 8 samples, page 2 etc

Overall - for the price I am still happy and continue to use it

a winner for the quality/price

it sounds good, it has an excellent connectivity and I have no complain whatsoever.

Maybe a bit cumbersome when it comes to feed it with your own sounds.

USB

USB connection produce some a little noise

Avoid this product

Seems like it would be hard to get something so simple, so wrong. This just doesn't work as its supposed to. I've been using akai samplers since the 90's with ease. Once I finally got the samples to actually load (4+hrs of re-editing samples, re-formatting drives and wondering why its inserting buzz noises and other samples at the end of samples) set it up in the studio, worked fine. Turned it back on next day, only plays about 1esc of every sample no matter what setting its on and couldn't get the kits to save on any re-formatted SD card, again! Pure headache for such a simple product. Avoid at all costs...

MIDI triggering is very unreliable.

I was using this to manually trigger vocal samples during live performance. There is no way to set the trigger volume on 100% always, but other than that it works fine in that application.

When using an external sequencer to trigger samples via MIDI, the MPX8 does not deliver. When 2 or more samples are sequenced at the same time, the triggering is very unreliable to the point that it is unusable. i.e. Only one of the assigned samples gets triggered.

There are no sample choke groups you can setup - I understand that this is in the specs when you look for it, but it should have been clearly stated.

Overall this sample player is performing very poorly and AKAI does not seem to care enough to fix bugs via firmware update.

Very nice sampler player

This sampler player combines drum pads with a potentially huge collection of samples stored on an SD card. Very easy to use and good utility.

A mobile sampler!!

Amazing 8 pads mobile sampler from Akai! I bought it cause I like the mobility and the sd card function! Nice quallity & price! Recommended if you need a mobile sampler to load samples from sd card!

Plays back samples - pretty versatile, portable

I use this for live playback of mainly drum samples and loops.

The eight pads and multiple banks provide enough flexibilty for my purposes at present and the 32MB limit across a bank hasn't proved a problem despite having a whole song-length drum track loaded plus several loops.

One gripe is that you can't deactivate velocity sensitivity yet the pads have to be hit pretty hard to reach maximum or pretty loud playback. Funnily enough when I'm playing back a loop that forms the main rythm track I have absolutely no need to be able to play it back at different velocities (who really does?) so I have to rely on my synth player to whack it suitably hard to ensure we don't have an ultra quiet drum backing no one can hear.

I also have the akai sample pad (which has pads to be hit with sticks) and that does allow you to deactivate velocity sensitivity but doesn't let you loop samples. Grrr.

Gripe over - the MPX8 is a decent piece of kit - there's nothing we could replace it with for a similar price and so far we've managed with it well live.

Good Sampler

I found the pad sensitivity very good, the controls are easy to navigate and very easy to use for those people who aren't familiar with using such a device. The bank of sounds stored in the device could be increased I think, the amount of sounds that could be replicated without the use of an SD card wasn't particularly impressive. All in all though, considering the price, this is a great, very versatile product.

Small, simple and worth the money

Hi! I bought this small sampler and I have used it for a couple of months, for small and simple things. It works perfect and I think it worth the money.