Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000
By retrostyles Mon Jan 09, 2023 9:05 pm
Hello there,

Years ago I had and MPC 2000 (Classic) and I was using floppies to save the projects. I was saving into .aps and not every .pgm file seperately, the same applies for the sequences and songs, I was using .all
The MPC 2000 is sold many years now and I own an MPC 2500 and I would like to transfer my old beats to the 2500 (I still have the floppies and the files backed up to my Mac).
I know and I have tested that the 2500 can read the .snd the .pgm and .mid files but not the .aps and .all files (whether I'm using the Akai or JJ (free) OS).

Is there any program that can extract the .pgm files from .aps and the .mid from .all?

As for now I have tried without success the MPC Editor and the vMPC2000xl

Thanks in advance.
By retrostyles Mon Jan 09, 2023 11:26 pm
In order to answer my own thread, I tried MPC Beats, the free version of MPC Software and if you open the .aps and .all through the in-software file browser then it works. You can export the .pgm and .mid files. Attention though, the last legacy supported MPCs are the 1000/2500 and their sequence and program files.

And now a little extra info on my problem and its solution:
MPC 2000/XL support longer than 8 characters naming schemes (excluding the .file-extensions) but the problem is that if you try to copy the files from the media (floppy, cf etc etc) then because of a proprietary file system Akai used back in the day the file names are truncated up to 8 characters so many of them appear as duplicates and you can't really backup the files or copy them. The solution is to use a software mpc-2000-floppy-extractor and extract the files from this nice utility. It works from physical floppies or from images of them. More info you can find here Akai MPC 2000's strange floppy format.
Since you can extract all the sounds without any trouble, you can import the .aps and .all files to MPC Beats and enjoy your old beats again and/or transfer them to your new MPCs.

Peace!