AKAI Professional has introduced MPC Beats, a new free beat making DAW fully equipped with instruments, effects, and VST / AU plugin support.
The Akai MPC software has gone through many stages of development in recent years. From a shaky start with many bugs to an almost perfect release. These major developments were supported with constantly new hardware devices: MPC One, X, Live…
Now the creators of the current MPC series want to convince all electronic musicians of their latest releases. With MPC Beats, Akai released a fully-featured, beat making DAW with the traditional MPC workflow for free with no hidden costs.
MPC Beats comes with built-in virtual instruments, feature-rich sampler (sample editor), piano roll for editing MIDI notes, mixer, no less than 80 audio effect plugins, and 2 GB of samples & loops. Of course, it also includes the MPC-style pads for triggering samples/loops. Thanks to pre-installed templates, various MIDI controllers can be used with the software without any problems. For controllers without a suitable template, it allows you to map the pads and other controls that give you a hands-on beat making experience.
There are not just built-in virtual instruments and effects to build beats straight away, there is also full support for VST and AU plugins. This is a great feature for such a free software that can significantly expand the sound arsenal. Plus, you can load MPC Beats as a plugin in other DAWs like Ableton Live, Studio One, Logic Pro, Cubase.
The software is completely free, this deserves a thumbs up. However, the internal library can be expanded with sound packs ($9.99 USD each) for genres like Techno, Deep House, and Soul or instruments.
Akai made us a nice present. No half baked software but a complete one with many features that are known from the hardware devices. Well, it is not hardware but you don’t look into a gift horse’s mouth, the saying goes. For me, it looks like an impressive free software with which you can familiarize with the classic MPC way of working without spending money on hardware.
Akai MPC Beats is available now as a free download from the official website.
More information here: Akai
Be the first to comment