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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Arturia’s MicroFreak has some open source engines and it’s an amazing piece of hardware.

I understand why someone can love Zynthian but it has little appeal to me…I’d rather have an MPC (they also run Linux) because of all the decades of design experience they embody and the volume of wisdom that I can access regarding them.

But that’s me, not you or anyone else.

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Zynthian is a Swiss-army knife of audio tools .. it is a pretty great synth host, but its also an amazing effects processor, audio/midi router, USB hub for other synths, mini-DAW - every usb audio class device you plug into it can be perpetually recorded, and so on. I’m not sure its in the same class as the MPC as an instrument, but it is definitely in its own class as a studio tool.

MPC’s support 32x32 over a class compliant interface (but only at 44.1).

They have effects, plugins, sampling, recording, etc.

Plus a pretty sophisticated DAW, robust hardware, and a lot of different flavors depending on what you want… And the ecosystem includes desktop tools.

The Xynthan looks like a playground for developers…and that’s cool. But I don’t want to deal with that.

No doubt the MPC is a powerful machine - the comparison isn’t quite apt in that sense.

When there’s an open source ecosystem for MPC like the one for Zynthian, it’ll be an interesting time indeed …

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