Akai Professional MPX8 - Portable Sample Pad Controller With 8 Performance-Ready Velocity-Sensitive Pads, MIDI Connectivity and On-Board SD Card Slot

Great basic MIDI controller and sampler for home studio and live applications. I use mine at home for basic beat production/finger drumming, for which it works great. The pad sensitivity is a bit hard to get used to, but nothing ridiculous. The drummer in my band uses it on stage, with a drum pad MIDI controller triggering samples on the Akai. It works great for this as well, and allowed us to add samples and electronic drum sounds to our live set without adding a laptop or more expensive drum module to our live rig. There is quite a bit of negativity surrounding this sampler, but I think it's misplaced. The comparable 8 pad MIDI controller (no on-board samples) from Akai is $60, so the sampler portion that everyone seems to have issues with is really only $40. Yes it's limited to 16-bit mono WAV files, loads large samples slowly, and has a somewhat clunky interface. But if you need more flexibility and better performance, you should be looking at something like an Electribe or MPC. That simply doesn't exist in this price range.

This is a great, affordable alternative to many different sample pads on the market. The velocity sensors have a great response rate, there aren’t a lot of frills, and it’s pretty simple to set up. It’s a little clunky to edit with the dial, and the software is pretty buggy with being prone to crashing. But you can’t beat the price, and having a sampler that I don’t need any additional equipment (other than a speaker) is more than a fair trade off.

Excellent beginner sample player. There isn't really anything else at this price range that lets you load your own sounds onto a card and output to a speaker or you can use it as a simple midi controller. I saw some complaining reviews about having difficulty loading sounds but everything is laid out in the instructions and it's very easy to do so they just didn't bother following them. If you genuinely can't figure them out that's a you issue because there's nothing really easier out there.

I've never owned such an awful, worthless, and unreliable piece of gear as this thing. Every time I turn it on I want to smash it with a hammer. It takes forever to load files so it's of no use for playing multiple samples on the fly. The pad sensitivity can't be adjusted so the volume level is never consistent, and it keeps adding a bunch of horrible sounding reverb or panning it one side. It's not user friendly and built like a plastic toy that should've cost $20, not $200. Honestly, this thing has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and if I hadn't discarded the box, I'd be returning it. Really disappointing that Akai, which used to be a good name, would make something this amateurish and terrible. Stay away from this so-called sampler, it's utterly worthless.

This device continues to be a fundamental tool in my live presentations, you just have to understand a little how it works and know how to prepare the audio files for it to work correctly, even though it was launched a long time ago, it is still professional, useful and resistant. I am happy with this unit

This is a cool product idea at a cool price point, but an insultingly lazy execution on AKAI's part. I'm leaving this review to vent some frustration. The software--the Editor + Conversion Utility, as well as the firmware on the sample pad itself--is *garbage*. - The MPX8 Editor software is beyond buggy on macOS. Does not open 95% of the time. When it does, it often glitches out and does not offer accurate information. Even if it did work, it is an underdeveloped program to the point of adding frustration and uncertainty to the process. Do not use it. - The File Conversion Utility is buggy too, but worse, it does not properly prepare the files for the MPX8. Do not use it. Files run through the Utility played back on the MPX8 with a glitchy metallic "beep" at the end, mixed with other samples that had not been triggered. - The firmware on the pad itself, while not quite as bad as the bundled software, is frustratingly picky. As best as I can tell, files need to be 16-bit mono 44.1 WAV, stripped of all metadata, with simple filenames of 8 characters or less. They need to be on the root/top-level of the SD card and unorganized by folder. The SD card need be 32gb or less. If any of these requirements are broken, things start to break. The manual does not make all of these things clear. My advice on how to use: 1. Download Audacity and use that process your WAV files--import, sum to mono if need be, export with short filename and no metadata, 16/44.1--one by one. 2. Drag the processed files directly onto the top level of your SD card. 3. Put the SD card into the MPX8 and manually create new kits on the MPX8 directly. They will show up as new kits starting with "e" (ex. e01 = External Kit 01) In total I've spent ~10-20 hours wrestling with this thing. It works for me now, but looking back on all that time spent I should've just returned it. On the whole, it's one of the most disappointing purchases I've ever made.

Only reason I got this was to have a portable MIDI controller for when I’m away from my home setup, this works pretty decent for that. However, I can’t recommend this to be your only MIDI controller if you’re starting out certain features are limiting. Sample loading is possible but tedious, I operate on Mac and the computer applications to load samples won’t work as intended, I had to use Audacity and I can’t create kits with the provided app. This doesn’t bother me too much because I’ll always use this with a computer. It would’ve been a nice feature if the usability wasn’t so much of a hassle. I’m an Ableton User and this connects fine to my computer and I can create drum racks, however this device has a set octave where the pads are located (I haven’t found a work around to change this). 8 pads is enough to work with for me but you have to move each individual sound to those set of pads to get it going. Other MIDI controllers can change their octaves to provide different sound banks but this doesn’t have that feature (Not a deal breaker but it’s worth noting in my opinion). If you can get this on sale the portability is the biggest selling point of this device but if this was my only option for a MIDI controller I’d be pretty frustrated. I recommend the MPK Mini iii that’ll serve you better for an all in one.

Es muy versátil. Una herramienta impecable. Aunque a veces dio error y es engorroso cargar los samples, para el precio está bien.

Straight forward easy ready to go mpc anywhere on the go..

J’ai pris ce drumpad pour mon compagnon et il adore !!!!! Parfait pour faire de la musique, les touches sont agréables

I put off buying this for a long time, mainly due to reviews here and elsewhere online. After watching a product demonstration on YouTube I decided to buy and I am very glad that I did. This is an excellent piece of kit that does exactly what I needed. I was looking for a stand-alone sample pad that did not need to connect to a laptop and would fit straight into my existing keyboard rig. The MPX16 ticks those boxes, resting neatly on one of my keyboards on its non-slip rubber feet. The menu system is so intuitive that within a few minutes of unboxing I had figured out most of the functions without referring to the manual. The pads themselves are robust and dynamic, responding well to velocity and colour-coded to indicate in play, sample assigned etc. Within a couple of hours the MPX16 was part of my set-up and I was using it live; it's that easy to use. I need it to trigger phrases so I won't say much about the internal sounds; they seem OK but most of them (like the hip hop kits) won't be of any use to me. I want to address some of the comments in other reviews. There have been a number of comments about how difficult people found it to load samples, not knowing what format they should be in. The user manual on page 9 makes it pretty clear which formats are acceptable so before the product arrived I had prepared my samples in Audacity (if you're working with samples and you don't have Audacity, you should download it immediately). It was a simple task to drag and drop my samples onto my correctly-formatted card (also page 9) and the MPX16 picked them up immediately. If you want to use the MPX16 as the card reader, the instructions on page 12 are quite clear on how to do this. Alternatively, you can download the converter from the Akai site. I have seen a number of comments that the maximum capacity of samples that can be loaded into a kit at any time is 30MB - in fact, it's 48MB (page 9 again!). Most of the problems encountered by other reviewers would have been avoided if they'd read the manual! However, it is true that each kit takes a while to load from the card. I have one kit containing 38MB of samples and it takes about 2.5 minutes to load. Having said that, if you arranged your set and your kits appropriately, you could still probably get away with it. Again, use Audacity to optimise your samples to make them as lean as possible. I haven't tried sampling on the device; at the moment, it's not what I need it for. Having said that, like everything else about the MPX16 it appears to be fairly straightforward. Overall, I am very pleased that I went with the MPX16. It may not be for everyone, but it's perfect for my requirements.

Leuk toestel wel wat studiewerk om hem onder de knie te krijgen. Ik gebruik hem als DJ om jingles mee af te spelen.

Qualité professionnelle, une fois que l'on matrise les différents paramètres les possibilités sont énormes.