If you hear this sound..run for your life! Crashing 2kxl !!

I could'nt resist posting this. If you go to my "Tunes and Grooves" I just put up a 2 minute file of the sound my 2kxl made when it crashed about a year ago..I forgot that I had this.

I had been having trouble with the MPC freezing..and doing these really weird things to my loops, playing them out of time etc. And when this would happen I would sit back and just listen to the mayhem. Finally one day I threw my Hard Disk into record and captured the whole thing.

Well, the MPC did stop working after this recording I captured..and it turned out to be an easy circuit board fix.

So if you have 2 minutes and want a laugh, dial it in..

Oh and by the way...the last 15 seconds or so are nasty so make sure your speakers are'nt up too loud -

One of the snd/wav files has a bad value in it. When the MPC loads sounds, it takes the start and end points in the file and adds that to the memory location that the sound will be stored in memory. For example, if the next free memory location is 34265, it will add the start and end points to this, say 18 and 3100 to get memory referece of 34283 for start and 37365 for end. If the start or end point has a bad or negative value it could end up with something like 34265+(-31566) = 2709. Now the MPC will start playing whatever it finds at 2709 and play until 37365 in this case. Other samples could be at that location, pgm files, or maybe even exectutable code. The same could happen for the end point (which would explain the static like sound at the end).

Once I ran across this, I would modify these values intentionally to get some interesting stuff. You can also take any file on your computer and load it up as RAW data in just about any audio editor to play it back and get mostly nonsense.

The CD that came with MPC2000XL has some bad values in the WAV files. I know there is at least one on the MPC3000 Standard disk set folder if you want to try it out.