The Akai Professional MPK Mini Play mk3 is a compact MIDI keyboard controller and a portable keyboard with 128 built-in sounds.
The new model promises improved playability and a more powerful speaker.
The 25-note keyboard has improved velocity response and two octaves. The eight velocity-sensitive drum pads are now officially ‘MPC-style’, while the four parameter control knobs have been moved above them. And there is an arpeggiator onboard, as well.
The Akai MPK Mini Play mk3 build-in sounds includes acoustic/electric pianos, synths, pads, drum kits and more, and there is a built-in speaker – a better, more powerful one than was in the original MPK Mini Play – meaning you can jam away without any other hardware. There is also a 1/8-inch headphone jack.
Polyend has released Tracker v1.5, a firmware update that lets you save separate instruments with their settings, so you can import them to other projects, select slices in sample playback and more.
New Features:
Tracker can now save separate instruments with all their settings. This allows importing those instruments to other projects you’re working on.
You can now select slices in sample playback Beat Slice mode by pressing the corresponding pads
The “Step” function button label in Pattern Editor is now labeled “Step jump”
Bug Fixes:
Incorrect Fill range in certain settings is now fixed,
Sample recorder wasn’t recording if MIDI chord was playing,
Un-deletable instrument after loading project from the previous version is now fixed,
5.0b1 regression: samples could be normalized to 0 after adding a new sample to the song,
Fixed freeze after changing granular LFO settings,
Bringing up the Instruments popup on the Tracker screen occasionally resulted in a flickering screen,
Slice fill effect counted “From” and “To” ranges incorrectly,
Tracker mixer’s visual performance is now better,
Removing OFF events revealed a left-over MIDI instrument on the track,
Puremagnetik has introduced Ember, an open-source microsound resynthesizer.
Here’s what they say about it:
“Ember is a sophisticated microsound collage tool that employs granular resynthesis to configure complex sound composites. Inspired by musique concrète pioneers of the past several decades, Ember harnesses modern digital algorithms with classic splicing techniques to create dense and evolving soundscapes. Point it to a folder of sounds and Ember will generate a composite of granular textures that you can later use in your electronic composition process.”
Controls:
Composite Time – The length of the output recording (in seconds)
Min Sound Dur – the minimum length to slice a sound (in seconds)
Max Sound Dur – the maximum length to slice a sound (in seconds)
BINARL – Create a spatial audio (binaural) mix
RENDER – Load the samples and begin processing. Abort the recording by pressing it again.
Ember is available as part of Puremagnetik’s $9/month Lore subscription.
