• The best usb keyboard with pads!

  
  As reviewed by Dietrich on 2/9/2009

  This product is simply an amazing peice of equipment. Its worth the full price!!! The Akai MPK looks and FEELS like a MPC with a very nice and smooth keyboard attached. Its and very friendly plug and play controller and gave me very little problems at all. The best part it has the swing feature. It can work with pretty much any beat program especially Reason and even something FL Studio too! The pads are smooth, not as smooth as the mpc's but close proximity tho. The keyboard itself tho weigh a ton and has a hard metal casing so you know this thing a bad boy already. I have had the M-audio Axiom 25 keyboard and it was a dissapointment with non friendly controls,poor pads, and hard bulky keys (3 times, is the times I took the Axiom back) I'm glad I have the MPK 49. I hope Akai continues makes more genuine keyboards like these.

  31 of 31 people found this review helpful.
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• Nothing Better Than Akai Professional!

  
  As reviewed by Benjamin T. on 12/6/2010

  I just bought the Akai MPK49 and all I can say is WOW! I also picked up Ableton 8 while I was there and the two combined, makes an unstopable pair! a MUST buy for any computer music fanatic!

  11 of 11 people found this review helpful.
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• Excellent midi controller

  
  As reviewed by Ronnie on 10/22/2010

  I've had my eye on this keyboard for some time now (years actually) but when it came to buying this, it often felt like I was spending money on a luxury. I'll admit, what people said about it is true, that it had issues from the moment I plugged it in -- it wasn't detected by windows and had massive issues with getting recognized. When I plugged it in (windows 7), the little screen wouldn't light up, and windows gave me an error saying "unknown usb device". Someone mentioned a shortcut to resetting the firmware which was to hold down [<< + STOP + REC] while plugging it in, which lit up the device, when it asked me if I wanted to proceed in resetting it I hit [Cancel] intead. Bingo, the device was lit now. So it was powered, and once I selected it as a Midi Controller in Live (it comes up in the dropdown list of Midi controllers as "MPK49") it worked perfectly through USB and I don't have to do any tricks to get it to turn on anymore, just plug and play. I blame Microsoft for this problem though, not Akai. Windows will never be predictable when it comes to developing USB devices for it. Especially since Vista. Despite the few hours it took me to get it working, it's a beautiful device, and works wonderfully. All the controls automate easily, the keys feel good for playing (semi-weighted is a good balance for playing synth and piano) I had a fully weighted keyboard (the Triton LE) and it was awkward for playing synths or anything non-piano. My favorite thing though is the little mixer console, it doubled my mixing time, ability, and productivity. My workflow is totally changed now. It's really nice to have the pads too, however it's not sensitive enough and you really have to hit them hard to get the desired response. Still, nice to have. I really have no complaints and I'm going to be using this controller for a long time. I'd recommend it to anyone. cheers

  6 of 6 people found this review helpful.
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