For connecting to other external equipment and your audio interface, you have 2 midi in and 2 midi out connections. You have USB slots for external hard drives and USB drives, as well as one SD card slot. You can easily receive and send audio data via USB. On the rear panel you find enough connections to make most beatmakers happy. The downside is that this minimal interface requires some doube taps & shift presses to get to less used options. Something that I hate about making music with digital plugins. You are not afraid to jump into making a beat because you feel overwhelmed with too many button choices. The MPC Live looks slick! It has the iconic 16 velocity sensitive pads and a bunch of buttons and encoders, but a lot of complexity is hidden behind the big beautiful touch screen. As someone who likes a clean user interface, this is definitely appreciated. Four weeks in, I feel confident writing an MPC Live review and summarize my main takeaways so far. It promised to be a complete independent workstation which doesn’t require a computer to make beats.

I’ve stayed away from the Akai MPC Live so far, but with recent updates I heard more and more good things about it. Unfortunately each hardware device had some shortcomings, which never let me leave the Macbook in the closet.

Over the years I always felt the urge to go back to hardware and ditch the computer.

Akai professional mpc one review