I can play samples while they're loading

Yeah, I know this is kind of useless info. But I'll share it anyway.
I just started up the MPC2000 and loaded up a huge PGM. While the PGM was still loading, I was able to play some of the samples on the first pad bank.
I never bothered to try that before. It's really useless info for the most part. But if you happen to load a huge PGM and want to make sure you loaded the right one, at least you'll be able to know right away and decide whether to let the disc load or restart the MPC if it takes too long. There's no way to "cancel" as the PGM is loading. So rebooting the MPC while it's loading the wrong PGM doesn't seem to cause any harm, from what I understand.

Another thing that I noticed is that the samples in the PGM do not load in the order of pads 1-16. The samples most likely load in the order that's found on the disc. I don't think they load in alphabetical order, since I noticed that the samples are never really displayed in that order while scrolling through the list. I've been observing most of this stuff lately out of curiosity. Even if I sorted all my files by name after copying to disc from my PC, the MPC still lists them in whatever order it wishes to read. I understand that the file system is primitive. But I just wanted to point out what I've found, whether or not that info would be useful to anyone.

PS: The "view" field is a huge time saver. But most of you already know that.

distortedtekno wrote:I just started up the MPC2000 and loaded up a huge PGM. While the PGM was still loading, I was able to play some of the samples :

You are correct .
However if you ever try the 2000XL you'll find they discontinued this capability for some reason.

distortedtekno wrote: rebooting the MPC while it's loading the wrong PGM doesn't seem to cause any harm, from what I understand.

Maybe, but rebooting anything while it's performing a function is not a wise idea.

Were older versions of the XL's OS allowing you to do that? Or did it just never work that way at all?

distortedtekno wrote:Were older versions of the XL's OS allowing you to do that? ?

Not as far as I remember.
I've had the XL since it was first released (can't remember which OS version was my first) and I seem to remember this was one of the first differences I noticed from the classic.



edit: I just checked.
I have all the OSs on floppies going back to v.1.1
So I guess either that was my first, or the one before that (if there was one) ( version 1.0 I guess ).

It's possible that Akai made sure this wasn't able to happen on the XL's OS incase it causes any problems. I noticed that some samples would produce some glitching while the PGM was loading on the 2K. I'm not sure if this would cause the processor to bottleneck or cause any errors. But as far as shutting off the unit while it's loading, I'll play it safe.

distortedtekno wrote: I'm not sure if this would cause the processor to bottleneck or cause any errors. .

I've certainly never had a problem from pressing a few pads while loading.
It's kinda fun to hear some glitchey noises while waiting for it to load .

I'll have to make a PGM full of loops to see if this would choke up the CPU.

distortedtekno wrote:

Another thing that I noticed is that the samples in the PGM do not load in the order of pads 1-16. The samples most likely load in the order that's found on the disc.

I'm not even sure they load in the same order each time, though I never checked.
But whatever, it seems to have a mind of it's own when loading.



I really should get my 2000 classic out a little more often. It been getting overlooked in it's case for a long time.




btw. The other thing they discontinued with the XL is the animation with the garbage bin when you delete from the disk.
I miss that

I like that animation with the trash bin.... definitely ahead of it's time for such an old machine.

The strange thing is that I still haven't seen the icon for the MO disc, even though it's shown in the manual. The 2K shows the HD icon instead.

so is the m.o. drive recognized as a legit storage system for the 2000 classic? i have been toying with the idea of getting one so I have more storage per disc but am unsure about installation, conversion, casing

Ron-Jay wrote:so is the m.o. drive recognized as a legit storage system for the 2000 classic? i have been toying with the idea of getting one so I have more storage per disc but am unsure about installation, conversion, casing

Yes, SCSI MO drive is mentioned on 2000 classic manual. MO disk was at one point most popular data storage system in Japan. Akai used to sell SCSI MO drive as well.

Lampdog wrote:You shouldn't power cycle while reading/writing to disk/media. You stand the chance of corrupting data.

I understand how data can be corrupted when saving data and shutting the unit down. But I'm not too sure if it's possible to corrupt data while loading data. I don't see how that could happen. But I could be wrong. It's not something I would normally do.

well I guess because the head is on the disk and maybe it could cause a hickup or something... who knows. I try to avoid that shit cause disk errors are a pain. I rarely get them though...

I really shouldn't recommend powering down the MPC at all while loading files. I'm sure a lot of people would be irritated to end up with disc errors. So I'll play it safe with that and stick with the original observations, which are rather trivial, but seemed worth mentioning for the sake of conversation. I like discovering these small abnormalities. Since we're on the subject of small abnormalities, I'm always curious to discover these things and discuss them here to share. I like reading about other similar things that I wasn't aware of. The "auto-chop" thread was one in particular that I found interesting, for example.