Akai MPC vs. NI Maschine

[Marsdy]

Hi all.

I’m looking for real world experience of Akai MPCs, specifically the MPC AAX plug-in in PT.

I’ve come to the end of the road with Native Instruments Maschine. I’ve had every generation of Maschine but over the past couple of years there have been some horrible showstopping bugs. The last straw was a bug that broke multiple outputs in Pro Tools and took NI four months to fix! When these bugs happen it has been pretty much impossible to roll back to previous versions.

So I’m looking at an Akai MPC One or maybe an MPC X. I’d mostly be running it in controller mode with the MPC AAX plug-in. Primarily I’m wondering how stable it is in Pro Tools?

What is the workflow like? I’m kind of wary of having to duplicate arrangements/song structures in both the MPC and PT. If I create a pattern in the MPC, or a Sequence as Akai call it, I see it can be recalled by program changes. In other words, is switching Sequences in the MPC with program changes sent from a track in Pro Tools a viable workflow?

I gave up doing this sort of thing in Maschine and in the end, I just used it as a sound module, sequencing Maschine sounds from MIDI in Pro Tools. Can you do this with the MPC plug-in.

I’ve been using Abelton Live sync’d to PT for this sort of thing and it works great. The problem is - too much mousing around and I have mouse related RSI and osteoarthritis so I’m trying to use hardware controllers where possible.