Sorry, but I am beyond manufacturing endless excuses to justify imposing such unreasonable limitations upon myself.♫ In stock: It is in stock and available to ship or pickup. I would absolutely hate to have to settle for the molasses load times of Keygroup instruments or be limited to Akai's mediocre virtual instruments/synth engines.

I gain very little in convenience or portability (actually lose out, frankly), but I lose out massively in power and access to plug-in/virtual instrument/library ecosystems. There is almost no benefit going from that to a Standalone, for me. Compute-wise, no standalone is even in the same stratosphere. The One is about the same size as my Laptop, dimensionally, actually heavier, and I can run it off a battery or small USB-C 67W charger. When you just don't feel like dealing with the antiquated MPC Workflow, the One will be just as awful when you plug it into a PC, unless you want to run the 'horrible' MPC 2 Software. However, the SAME THING APPLIES to the MPC One when used in Controller Mode. It's borderline unusable outside of the software.

The PC Software is actually better than the firmware, in various places. The Nektar Aura Beat Composer is pretty damn good, and doesn't cost considerably more than a Studio or Maschine Mikro.

You can get hardware controllers for any DAW. So, if it's 'horrible' on a PC with the Studio Controller, I am struggling to see how it's going to be any better on a One - outside of Placebo Effect or Confirmation Bias. MPC Software is really no different than the One's FW, just on a PC instead of a Controller. MPC Studio 2 comes with MPC 2, not MPC Beats.

Akai professional mpc studio 2