First MPC. Couple of questions.

First of all hello gang, always wanted an mpc due to hip hop and house hero worship. Got a great price for a 2000 and have been offered what seemed a crazy good price on a rack mpc (not entirely sure what it is bit assumed they weren't so great before reading up on them). Will report back.

Anything absolutely worth knowing about the 2000? The seller gave me a midi to USB cable which he said would be invaluable but I'm not entirely sure sure why when I could just straight midi into my system.

Also, what's the best way of loading your own samples in? I'm looking at external floppy drives. Is that the way to go?

Many thanks from an excited new owner.

I think most people here have done a CF card reader swap, much better than the floppy disks. Also with the swap, you can buy a multi-card USB adapter that will fit CF cards so you can transfer samples between PC & the MPC via the cards. Do a search here on the forums for the swap and a pretty comprehensive thread should come up, both with good/bad card readers to buy, and a full-on instructional how-to about how to do the swap itself.

2000 classic, the card reader is not as great because it requires the use of SCSI... the 2000xl is where CF cards play a more prominent role.

The mpc you are buying is a sampler... if you are just "loading" your sounds ... why come over to the mpc in the first place.... to use it as a prop? You sample right into the machine, chop and truncate your sounds, create programs with those bits of sound, sequence those programs, arrange those sequences, save those compositions to floppy, MO drive, hard drive, or what ever medium you have.

The issue is, RAM is limited (32 megs) and space on floppy disks is even more so. Your process of chopping and truncating will likely involve some tricks to reduce the sample size... for example; sampling in mono instead of stereo (then add panning and FX if you have the EB16, or externally), cutting out long tails, then adjusting ADSR type parameters or using some looping to create artificial decay tails.. cutting out air between key areas inside samples... then replacing that missing air with a single air sample that you loop... etc. The process of all those types of techniques is the entire point of going back to an old machine like the MPC 2000... the sound it was known for came from stuff like that more than any electrical component.

mr_debauch wrote:2000 classic, the card reader is not as great because it requires the use of SCSI... the 2000xl is where CF cards play a more prominent role.

The mpc you are buying is a sampler... if you are just "loading" your sounds ... why come over to the mpc in the first place.... to use it as a prop? You sample right into the machine, chop and truncate your sounds, create programs with those bits of sound, sequence those programs, arrange those sequences, save those compositions to floppy, MO drive, hard drive, or what ever medium you have.

The issue is, RAM is limited (32 megs) and space on floppy disks is even more so. Your process of chopping and truncating will likely involve some tricks to reduce the sample size... for example; sampling in mono instead of stereo (then add panning and FX if you have the EB16, or externally), cutting out long tails, then adjusting ADSR type parameters or using some looping to create artificial decay tails.. cutting out air between key areas inside samples... then replacing that missing air with a single air sample that you loop... etc. The process of all those types of techniques is the entire point of going back to an old machine like the MPC 2000... the sound it was known for came from stuff like that more than any electrical component.

I'm chopping records and mic'ed sounds on the fly a lot and working them into beats on the MPC. Trying to get a good workflow with synths and DAW and I've been sampling for years, just not with a hardware sampler. There's a lot of stuff I painstakingly arranged into 'kits' that I'd love to retain access to with the more performative putting together of sequences of the MPC.

Also anything I sample straight in would be useful to backup in a less temperamental medium than floppy disks.

Is the SCSI zip drive method worth looking at? I notice people with 2 way USB SCSI connections that look pretty appealing for what I want to achieve.

Thanks for the responses guys.

Pleasecruelty wrote:Also anything I sample straight in would be useful to backup in a less temperamental medium than floppy disks.

Is the SCSI zip drive method worth looking at? I notice people with 2 way USB SCSI connections that look pretty appealing for what I want to achieve.

i'm a broken record on this subject, but for good reason...just avoid zips. floppies are more reliable, seriously. more work, but actually reliable, whereas zip is going to fail, every time.

if you really can't get an internal card reader working, then i really like the scsi2sd project:
http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD
https://store.inertialcomputing.com/category-s/100.htm

less than $100 and looks just like a scsi harddrive to the sampler

and one more time, avoid zips, literally every other option is better.

tapedeck, did you get your scsi2sd issues with the MPC 2000 sorted out?

richie wrote:tapedeck, did you get your scsi2sd issues with the MPC 2000 sorted out?

no i never tried it, i just assume it works because it works with damn near everything else that gets thrown at it, and the mpc seems fairly forgiving as far as samplers go.

i tried it without knowing it would work on my emu and it worked perfectly, so i have hope.

somebody needs to figure it out

richie wrote:tapedeck, did you get your scsi2sd issues with the MPC 2000 sorted out?

somebody did get it working:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=171256&p=1756326#p1756326