AKAI Professional MPX16 - Portable Finger Drumming Sample Pad Controller with 16 Performance-Ready Pads, On-Board Recording, Built in FX & SD Card Slot

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.

Glad that I bought this and didn't pay attention to some of the reviews on here. I don't know maybe I didn't get a bad one. Super simple to use, does what it says, extremely straightforward to adjust pad parameters, easy to record with the usual AKAI threshold type settings. easy to adjust start and end points for looping. Sound is nice. Bought this to use for sample loop playing and finger drumming when gigging. Doesn't seem to take an excessive time to load kits evn with a few longer samples in their. Took me a little while to realise which SD card to use but bought the same 32GB cards that are recommended items to buy alongside the MPX16 anyway, which are fine. The cards have to be formatted as FAT32 so your limited to 32GB cards anyway

This sampler is great but I have found it a little bit anti user friendly. I have never owned a sampler before though so I am learning still.

I have a Roland electronic drum kit. Another reviewer has asked "What is this for?" I wanted to expand the sound pallette of my drum kit beyond its 125 built in sounds. The nearest competitor is the Korg Volca-Sample Digital Sample Player Synthesizer, but comments from users indicate that unit responds to any MIDI signal by playing the currently selected sound. That is no good for me as I need different sounds triggered depending on the note signals sent from the kit. The other option is the KORG ESX2 Electribe Sampler Music Production Station which is currently more than twice the price and has a lot of features I don't need.I have hesitated to buy this due to the bad reviews, but I felt that it would be a good solution to my problem if I could get it to work, and I could always return it if not, so I decided to take the risk. I bought the MPX16 rather than the MPX8 as my drum kit has more than eight pad triggers.First problem is that It wouldn't play some samples. Even after converting them with the conversion software that is downloaded from the Akai website they still wouldn't play. However, I discovered that if just imported them into Audacity and then exported them as 16 bit PCM WAV (the default option) they worked fine.The controls are a bit counterintuitive. The pads are numbered backwards, and the plus + key moves the cursor left, whilst the minus - key moves the cursor right. This is the opposite of what left-to-right reading Westerners would expect, but of course there are cultures in the world who read left-to-right so it suits them fine.Adjusting the MIDI channel to suit the drum kit works fine, and adjusting parameters such as tuning and reverb also works fine. I had a problem with the cymbal pads not triggering my crash sample, but if I assign the crash sample to a drum pad it works fine, which seems to suggest that this is a problem with my drum kit not sending MIDI signals rather than the MPX16.I have not used the sampling and I probably never will as I mostly used paid for professional samples. If I recorded my own I would use my TASCAM DP 006 Portable recorder and process them in a computer first.This unit has its faults, but it fits a particular need in the market at a nice price. Many of the people who gave bad reviews seem to expect too much for this price. It fits the need I bought it for, but I have to deduct stars for its faulty file conversion software, its slightly awkward usability, and the inability to change the MIDI channel which is stuck on 1. The manual also lacks detail, although some things are printed on the unit itself.