It takes much of the good found in several other devices by the manufacturer and applies it to itself to give you a compact model to produce music while being affordable. Gripe over - the MPX8 is a decent piece of kit - there's nothing we could replace it with for a similar price and so far we've managed with it well live. The Akai Professional MPC One is one of the latest standalone music production centers from Akai. I also have the akai sample pad (which has pads to be hit with sticks) and that does allow you to deactivate velocity sensitivity but doesn't let you loop samples. Funnily enough when I'm playing back a loop that forms the main rythm track I have absolutely no need to be able to play it back at different velocities (who really does?) so I have to rely on my synth player to whack it suitably hard to ensure we don't have an ultra quiet drum backing no one can hear. One gripe is that you can't deactivate velocity sensitivity yet the pads have to be hit pretty hard to reach maximum or pretty loud playback. The eight pads and multiple banks provide enough flexibilty for my purposes at present and the 32MB limit across a bank hasn't proved a problem despite having a whole song-length drum track loaded plus several loops.

I use this for live playback of mainly drum samples and loops.

Akai pro mpc touch