Ableton Forum

Hi all

I have a problem. When I use the right hand column to select which 16 pads to display, my drumpad controller dont automatically update to play the displayed pads.

The Ableton Live manual clearly says on page 244:

"If your pad controller is one of Ableton's natively supported control surfaces, simply select it as a control surface in the MIDI/Sync tab of Live's Preferences. From then on, as long as you have a Drum Rack on a track that's receiving MIDI, your pad controller will trigger the pads that are visible on your screen. If you scroll the pad overview to show a different set of pads, your controller will update automatically." (my emphasis)

I use a Akai MPD 18, which I'm sure is a natively supported control surface in Ableton.

Can anyone help me with this? If I could solve it, it would make my life with Latin Percussion sooooo much easier

- Alex

bumpetibum

make sure you selected your Akai pads in Live midi preferences -> control surfaces

I have an MPD 18 as well and I haven't been able to figure this out either. It worked fine on a PadKontrol when I had it though. To be honest, it's pretty cool, but it's not as useful as you would think. There is no way to map the little box to anything midi, so if you want to scroll the rack, it has to be done with the mouse, which limits it's appeal to me. Probably easier to just set up presets on the MPD and change between them.

Maybe, but still. Whenever I load a preset, I always use my left hand one the MPD18 to test the sounds, while going through all the pads in the Drum Rack column with the mouse in the right hand. Very handy!

And yes, I have selected the pad controller in the Midi Preferences.

Has anyone gotten it to work? If it works with Padkontrol and not Akai MPD18, which is both supported interfaces, it must be a bug... right?

- Alex

I can give you a workaround: assign a pitch device to the fader of your mpd18.
Now you can scroll with the fader.

Used this trick with my MPD16.

Sooo annoying, I still can't get it to work! Has tried the suggested settings and messed with the Akai Editor and the factory presets and also tried selfbuilt resets. It just doesn't seem to work! I am very frustrated!

- Alex

ShelLuser wrote:I can imagine your frustrations, and when going over the MPD18 product page I can't help wondering if this isn't an issue "by design" (aka a bug).

You see, when I got my MPD24 one of the first things I did was grabbing the latest firmware. In the mean time I've come across several people who also owned an MPD24 yet still couldn't do the stuff I did with it (like, for example, use the start/stop/record buttons (MPD18 doesn't have these)). And in most cases it turned out that they were using an older version of the firmware.

I noticed that the MPD18 cannot be upgraded with new firmware. And since its older than the MPD24 I can imagine that this is a possible cause why it behaves in the way it does.

Frustrating, but I'm afraid that's the way it is.

mpd18 is a NEWER product, not older

I wonder if there is any way to file this as an issue to Ableton? And if there is any chance they would actually listen...?

- Alex

For anyone following this, the error has now been fixed from Live 8.1.4 and upwards.

Thank you Ableton!

- Alex

Um then why is it happening to me as well?

For people still having this problem, try downloading the MPD18 Preset Editor Software from the Akai site. Within this archaic-looking software, I set "Get Preset" to 1 (which is the chromatic setting), hit "Commit - Upload," restarted Ableton, and it worked.

Good luck!

BUMP!!
I'm using an MPD218 to play a few drum rack tracks live. I have to make sure they're all currently highlighting the correct layer in Pad Overview so that my A B C pad pages go where I want them to.

*Right-click in Overview*
"Disable live overview"