MPC owners are definitely aficionados of their gear — but, be warned, Akai, they can be just as exacting with their MPC grievances as they are with their MPC love. The Cynic writes us with this news from the MPC community:

Not sure if you guys are aware, but Akai has done a really shady thing with the MPC1000.

If you didn’t know the MPC1000 uses individual pad sensors, unlike every other MPC in the range - which use interlink sensors.

The MPC1000 has had multiple problems with the pads, from them going out, double triggering while sequencing, to just not working.

Akai is now offering a $199 “upgrade” kit for owners of the original MPC. They no longer offer replacement parts for the individual pads to my knowledge.

The killer is this though - new MPCs are shipping with the “upgrade” at the same price.

MPC1k owners are going nuts, and have started an online petition to send to Akai.

You can find the petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mpc1000/

…And more information here:
http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=61159
http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=45209
http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=84272
http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=84741
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/rap-hip-hop-engineering-production/154057-mpc1000-pad-petition.html

MPC1000 (or other MPC) owners with any opinions of your own on this matter, we’re happy to hear from you here, as well.

Akai, Community, hardware, MPC, petitions, reliability

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MP3:
01 A Basic Introduction To E.S.P. (3:49)
02 The Pendulum And How To Use It (4:18)
03 Testing Your Accuracy With The Pendulum (1:54)
04 The Sex Detector (1:20)
05 The Lie Detector (2:32)
06 Brothers And Sisters (2:00)
07 The Uncanny Test (2:22)
08 How To Catch A Murderer (5:04)
09 Using Your Imagination To Test Your E.S.P. (5:04)
10 Imagination And Swallowing (2:34)
11 Setting Up The Seance For Table Tilting (1:37)
12 The Phenomenon Of Table Tilting (8:24)

Many years ago (the late 90's to be exact), I worked at Kinko's. This is where I met Hans (hi Hans!) One day Hans and I were hangin' at his pad, the "Sweat Lodge," when I began to browse his record collection. This one jumped out at me and we arranged to transfer it to MiniDisc. I am eternally grateful. I'm still not sure what to make of Kreskin. We all know that the human brain is like...umm, really smart and stuff, but is this some kind of magic? He's made a career out of "reading minds," but is this really possible? So many questions, so little time.

It seems that this album followed in the wake of a successful board game of the same name for Milton Bradley. You don't need the board game to follow the exercises here though, just a spirit of adventure and basic skills in listening and comprehension.

For those of you who choose to try some of these (especially the table-tilting), PLEASE, relay your experience via the comment section of this post. We are most eager to learn your findings.

Technical Notes: This is a digital transfer (from MiniDisc to the hard drive.) Since the nature of this recording implements no stereo spectrum, these files have been rendered in Mono, at the highest resolution possible for an MP3 (128kbps.)

- Contributed by: Spaceboy

Images: Front Cover, Back Cover

MP3:
01 A Basic Introduction To E.S.P. (3:49)
02 The Pendulum And How To Use It (4:18)
03 Testing Your Accuracy With The Pendulum (1:54)
04 The Sex Detector (1:20)
05 The Lie Detector (2:32)
06 Brothers And Sisters (2:00)
07 The Uncanny Test (2:22)
08 How To Catch A Murderer (5:04)
09 Using Your Imagination To Test Your E.S.P. (5:04)
10 Imagination And Swallowing (2:34)
11 Setting Up The Seance For Table Tilting (1:37)
12 The Phenomenon Of Table Tilting (8:24)

Many years ago (the late 90's to be exact), I worked at Kinko's. This is where I met Hans (hi Hans!) One day Hans and I were hangin' at his pad, the "Sweat Lodge," when I began to browse his record collection. This one jumped out at me and we arranged to transfer it to MiniDisc. I am eternally grateful. I'm still not sure what to make of Kreskin. We all know that the human brain is like...umm, really smart and stuff, but is this some kind of magic? He's made a career out of "reading minds," but is this really possible? So many questions, so little time.

It seems that this album followed in the wake of a successful board game of the same name for Milton Bradley. You don't need the board game to follow the exercises here though, just a spirit of adventure and basic skills in listening and comprehension.

For those of you who choose to try some of these (especially the table-tilting), PLEASE, relay your experience via the comment section of this post. We are most eager to learn your findings.

Technical Notes: This is a digital transfer (from MiniDisc to the hard drive.) Since the nature of this recording implements no stereo spectrum, these files have been rendered in Mono, at the highest resolution possible for an MP3 (128kbps.)

- Contributed by: Spaceboy

Images: Front Cover, Back Cover
Images (alternate scans in shrink): Front Cover, Back Cover

Java may not be on the radar of the average Mac user, but to the Java development community, Leopard has been a bombshell. Apple’s been slow with Java releases before, but something’s different this time: there’s been almost no information on the topic, and Apple has even pulled an existing Java 6 development build (released for Linux, Windows, Solaris, and every OS on Earth late last year). While Java and Apple apologists alike bend over to explain why this doesn’t matter / isn’t really an issue, we received an interesting comment here on CDMusic that suggests something big has happened they’ve all missed. This tipster argues Apple has all but eliminated its Java development team, and future development may (finally) fall to Sun. From our comments:

i had a long chat with a sun engineer over tea today where this issue came up as well. he was basically saying:

• apple has moved all developers from the java team to the ical team except for one poor bloke who is mainly working on a stable java 1.5 version
• the guy doing the actual 1.6 port left apple, apparently finishing the port is just a piece of cake, could be done in a few days but for legal reasons he cant do it anymore.
• apple will most likely never release an opensource version of their vm because it is a big dirty mess using various old frameworks all tied together in spaghetti code/ secondly it seems to require sourcecode access to the mac os x standard frameworks sources e.g. coreservices etc.
• some people at the java fx team at sun have started making their own java 1.7 runtime for os x which hints that eventually sun might take java for mac back under its control
• speaking of sound and other java things missing in osx - the answer is: wait for java fx! its very promising, you’ll be surprised.

Java everywhere, media everywhere: Why bother putting this on a site called Create Digital Music, and not, you know, Create Digital Java Applications? Because Java is a key, cross-platform development platform for music and multimedia, in the form of tools like the open-source coding-for-artists platform Processing, and a significant amount of media research. The alternative is generally less-elegant, more time-intensive C and C++ code; Ruby, C#, Python, and others haven’t really proven themselves for multimedia applications.

(...)
Read the rest of Rumor: Mac Java's Demise is Real, and Why That Could Be Good News for Multimedia (216 words)

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The iPhone and iPod Touch have big, pretty screens, plenty of space for touch control, and fit in your pocket for lots of other useful things (like, you know, calls or music or whatever these things were invented for).

So, why not put them to use in performance? Just this week, Create Digital Motion has picked up two new solutions for doing just that, free:

MIDI Control with iPhone and iPod Touch: i3L MIDI Bridge

Mrmr : iPhone + 10.5 + Quartz Composer = Wireless VJ Nirvana

Mrmr’s support of OSC is geared for VJ apps, but something similar could be applied to OSC-supporting music tools like Max/MSP, Traktor, Reaktor, and others. And i3L’s support of MIDI, of course, will work with anything. I could see it cuing up scenes in Ableton Live or changing instrument patches, etc.

No iPhone? No problem. One quick note: if you don’t have the cash for a new iPod or iPhone, there are always alternatives. Jason Kramer’s Bluetooth MIDI solution works just fine with that free phone you got with your plan — maybe even one you recently retired. Much as we love all this flashy new stuff, there’s nothing quite like giving your toxic technological leftovers a new lease on life!

Control Music Software with a Bluetooth Cell Phone / PDA (Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro)
LiveController [Jason R. Kramer]

controllers, DIY, hardware, iphone, iPod, MIDI, mobile, multi touch, OpenSoundControl, OSC, phones, software, tips, touch

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GetDarker.com has been holding it down for the dubstep massive for quite a while. And this studio mix put together earlier this summer by DJ T is a definite treat. The tracklist is filled with storming white labels and one-off remixes that have been killing Europe all summer. Oh yeah and if you are feeling charitable head over to dubstepforum.com and vote for GetDarker.com as dubstep site of 2007. - Source Site:http://www.getdarker.co.uk/

31st October 2007: Magix has announced that Sequoia 10 and Samplitude 10 are now available. New features in Sequoia 10 / Samplitude 10 Advanced track and object automation / master automation At track level, you can use...