It's simple and has not so many modulation and patching opportunities, but it sounds really well, sending into the EQ and compressor serial, it could be far good to make basses, leads and fx. In other side, the built in synthesizer is awesome. (Or if you dedicate that the MPC let the BPM master to all other gear, some of them may supports only whole numbers as tempo, and you can hear a small desynchronisation and finally a small gaps time to time when these are resyncing itself after every 4 bar playing hence the minor tempo change.) It's just annoying because MPC5K built to be the center of the studio, and it can't be, because it's always fall behind all the good timed gears. Instead you can slave it to outside, like from computer or other gear. So you can't really fix this problem inside the MPC. Unfortunatelly, you can set the tempo in 1 decimal, like 125.1. I completely disappointed when I discovered, that MPC5K engine is just a litllet bit slower than the real BPM tempo.
After you opened once, settings are restored and you can leave the page. Another annoying bug is the Q-Link stuff: when you first loads a pattern, Q-Link settings are not loading till you doesn't open the Q-Link settings page. The only way to achieve this is to connect a MIDI controller to your MPC5K, and set the MIDI option that program change message initiates a track-change, because the MIDI implementation still enabled over song mode. After all, if this not enough, in song mode, you can't switch to pattern view, so you can't even change tracks! That means you can't change what you want to play over song mode. It's because the topology of the system, since HD play is bound to virtual tracks which are exists only in song mode. Like the HD option: you can play from harddisk only in song mode. Of course, it's not completely unusable, but you may expect long learning time to bypass hidden mines. (You may know, Numark bought Alesis too.) Other aspects, it's the worst MPC ever built, not so stable disk-operations, relatively slow loading, bad MIDI timing (wtf Akai pls!!! bad MIDI timing in a drum-computer? are you serious?) and frustrating restrictions which are making really bad reputation of this machine. (If we not count the Reneissance-era which is finally just a controller separated from the software in the computer.) Many aspects it's the best MPC ever built, it has a stable HD player, 24bit sampling engine, and built-in synthesizer, as I heard, it's a reduced Alesis ION packed.
The Akai MPC 5000 is the last serious sampling workstation from Numark Akai.
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