Akai ProfessionalMPX8 - Portable Sample Pad Controller with 8 Performance-Ready Velocity-Sensitive Pads, MIDI Connectivity & On-Board SD Card Slot, black

The akia MPX3 is Great for drum tracks and makes the whole thing alot easyer

Just one thing to mention about this product considering previous reviews. You could assign any length of sample to a pad - but it has to be under 3oMB, but also remember, that if you want eight samples assigned to each of the eight pads, then the sum of the size of all eight samples together must be under 30MBs. Therefore, if you had four samples whose combined file size was just under 30MB, then you would not be able to add any more to that particular 'kit'. You can have a 32GB SD card full of samples and numerous different 'kits' on it, but you still have a limit of total file size over the padsFor a drum kit, that would be more than adequate, and that is really what this is for. I use lo-fi,16 bit mono 22,000Khz samples, so less space, but even that can be a bit of a juggling act. But if you want long 16bit Stereo files, you would probably find this very limiting.If you are intending to use this as a drum trigger - I think it would be very useful -It is AKAI after all, and the pads are very popular. For me, I like it for one purpose: to trigger lo-fi loops. It is pretty robust but the software editor is not the easiest or most intuitive and can be a bit frustrating, but does have a few tweaking parameters. It wouldn't be my go-to piece of kit, but for my needs at this price it is certainly adequate.

I found it a bit hard to put down same samples on a SD Card when i did and they was wave form the unit didnot read it so it is not that good but on the plus side it dos have some good samples in it so you can use them in your DAW as long as you go though using a USB lead

I was pleasantly surprised by how solid the construction felt despite not being particularly heavy. Pads responded well and with firmware update - which I don't understand why it's not applied before shipping - worked. That said, there's a step missing. You need to power off the device, hold down the SELECT+ and VOLUME+ then with them held down power on the unit and follow the rest of the instructions. Took me ages to figure that one out.The only things I have against it were the speed it takes to queue up tracks from SD card. Seems to take about 3 seconds per second of audio. Not a huge problem if they stayed in memory but it you accidentally move off the memory card and back to it all the tracks need to requeue, same if the unit gets powered down. Also the MPX8 doesn't appear as an audio device, neither recording to nor transmitting from the device is possible over USB.

This seemed like a great product till I tried to use it. It doesn’t like the Mac at all so don’t even consider writing to an SD card unless you are using a PC. The hidden files on Mac drive it nuts. It doesn’t seem to like WAV files created by Ableton so you have to resave them in Audacity and be very careful not to have any information in the header. Once the sounds are in you would think it would be okay? In use it drops out notes it receives over the 5 pin MIDI port. You would think the USB port would connect you to the card reader? Nope! The velocity sensitivity on the pads isn’t musical and if you do get sounds working they jump out at you at full volume or no volume at all. Switch the machine off and on again and it comes back at a totally different volume. Frustrating and slow to use. Might be useful as a sound bank for a drummer but as a sampler or sample playback machine it’s awful.

Great 909 808 samples in this .I could never get my own samples to load on to card 😂😂⬆️ need a maths or computer degree ..works best triggered from a sequencer or lame sounding drum machine ..

Very good value for money. I power it using a USB port on my keyboard and I place it on my keyboard with Velcro strips to keep it in place.My only 2 criticisms are:1) It would be better if there was an option to turn off the velocity sensitivity because the sensitivity can be unpredictable and is too exaggerated.2) The programme that comes with it could be better designed; it takes a bit of working out as it doesn't quite work as obviously as one would expect.

I like this a lot, bought to play sounds for an exhibition. Really easy to set up, most importantly it can run without a Laptop, you just need an SD card. Was really easy to set up the sounds and load them on to the device, took me 10 minutes from out of the box to playing my samples. Really nice little bit of kit, I don't know anything about the software as I didn't need it.