Akai Pro Announces Standalone MPC Live

2017 NAMM Show: Akai Professional today announced a new addition to its iconic MPC line, the MPC Live.

While the new MPC X is designed to be a flagship MPC, the MPC Live expands on the production workflow of the more compact MPC Touch by adding standalone functionality.

At the heart of the new MPC Live is a full-color 7-inch multi-touch screen, 16 velocity- and pressure-sensitive RGB pads, and a large, clickable master encoder knob. The MPC Live is designed to be both portable and powerful, packing 2GB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage, but weighing in at just 5.5 lbs. It can even run battery-powered, via the internal, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

Powering MPC Live is MPC 2.0, Akai Professional’s new version of the MPC software. Capable of running natively on MPC Live in standalone mode, MPC 2.0 can also be run from a Mac or PC, with the MPC Live connected to a computer.

Among the new features added to 2.0 are: audio track recording, an improved time warp algorithm, enhanced Q-Link control, drag and drop audio/MIDI – all appearing on a new graphical interface.

Here’s the official intro video:

Features:

  • Works standalone or as a control surface for MPC 2.0 software
  • Internal, rechargeable lithium-ion battery
  • Turntable (RCA) inputs with ground peg
  • 16GB of on-board storage (over 10GB of sound content included)
  • User-expandable 2.5” SATA drive connector (SSD or HDD)
  • 2 pairs of full-size MIDI inputs and outputs
  • 2GB of RAM for sampling
  • SD Card slot
  • 2 USB-A 3.0 slots for thumb drives or MIDI controllers

“The MPC Live is an absolute beast. It truly represents a huge step forward in the product category,” said Dan Gill, Product Manager for Akai Professional. “MPC Live is the most powerful MPC we’ve made to date and yet it’s portable enough to take anywhere.

Here are a few beatmaking demos with the MPC Live:

In this ‘Standalone Challenge’ video, above, Grammy-award winning Trap producer Zaytoven (Gucci Mane, Migos, Drake, Future) creates a track from scratch using only the MPC Live and an MPK249 plugged directly into the Live. No computers were used.

Akai Pro also shared a few videos, demoing features of the MPC Live:

Pricing and Availability

The MPC Live is expected to be available in Q1 2017, price at US $1,199.

inMusic will be showing Akai’s new MPC 2.0 series, including MPC Live, later this month at the 2017 NAMM Show.

18 thoughts on “Akai Pro Announces Standalone MPC Live

  1. LOVE IT!!!! Its a really amazing product with the right price for all musicians like me that love to work and jam with hardware sequencers and samplers.

    Also I just read these in Akai’s Website: “Ableton Link and WiFi will be supported in future updates”!!!
    It was a WIFI antenna build-in!

    1. get a toraiz. pete goodliffe is a good programmer, but human resources at nukai are way too thin when it comes to coding imho. my guess is that v2.0 needs more than a year to be updated in order to be useable.

      1. I hear you man, I just watched the MPC video.. and get better vibes from the Toraiz OS even though it’s still teething. Toraiz looks like it wants to push forward. MPC looks more vast and open to navigate. Both will work.. yeah No doubt.

    2. I have a Toraiz – it’s a VERY basic workflow….insanely easy to make good beats because the OS is intuitive, simple almost shallow…nowhere as deep as the MPC although the Toraiz has some decent effects and filters. The Toraiz has a live sampling limit of 32 seconds, whereas the MPC has a full-on multi-track recorder. The MPC Live as we all know has a rechargeable lithium battery and is storage expandable. The MPC OS gives you WAY more control over samples and you can even line in a phonograph record player directly into the back of the unit. It has a grounding screw.

      What I love about the MPC Live is the fact that it is totally portable. I could slap a 2 TB drive in it, slide it into a backpack and make beats in a park, car, library or front porch. It’s just a great piece of equipment to grab and start making music instantly – when the ideas hit you.

  2. 16 pads for clip launching seems a bit too limited. It would be really interesting if it could take input from a launchpad (or APC) for clips, freeing up the pads for drumming.

    edit: it does look like the mpk in the demo is plugged in through usb, so if the live is a USB host then that should be doable.

  3. Both Gear4Music and GAK have these listed at £799. I cannot believe the UK isn’t getting shafted on the price here. I would have bet money it’d be £1199.

  4. congrats to Akai, they nailed it on these. i was so disappointed the the ‘Touch’ cause it wasn’t stand alone but they’ve done it here, very cool.

  5. Waiting to see what the early adopters think of these. It is basically a lil computer jammed into an mpc touch, so I’d like to see how the midi timing and any crashiness are before I pull the trigger.

  6. MPC LIVE… For me the first cool thing since years from akai. This self repeating boring MPC concept is all the years way behind of the technical standard… I look forward what Native Instuments will do… Stand Alone Maschine? Yes please!

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