Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000
ByDL Tue Jun 17, 2003 2:02 am
I just purchased an mpc2000xl with internal zip 100 drive and don't know too much about the machine. My problem is that when I load the disk in the unit (of course after formatting, and following the manual completely) it says that I only have 21.5s of sampling time, which tells me it's not recognizing the disc, even though it says I-Omega zip100. I'm very frustrated and not very electronicly inclined, so If anyone has the answer I would thank you very very much. Thank you. :x

By Ares 12 Tue Jun 17, 2003 5:04 am
Sample time has nothing to do with storage space. You probably need more RAM. Check out a 32MB chip, or 2 16mb chips.. 72PIN SIMM RAM, 70ns.. pretty common.. i got mine for $10 off pricewatch.com

ByDL Tue Jun 17, 2003 5:47 am
So I have 21.5s of sampling time for each sample, right? And I can store 100mb of samples/sequences onto my zip? Or do I have to buy more memory; because I thought that the disks would serve as my memory.
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By MPC-Tutor Tue Jun 17, 2003 7:09 am
No, your zip drive just stores your samples so you can load them into memory. Your memory chips will hold the samples when the machine is turned on. If you get 32MB of memory, you'll have 3 minutes of stereo sampling time, or 6 minutes mono.

ByDL Tue Jun 17, 2003 7:33 am
Thanks a lot for your help, Im going to buy a chip tomorrow. Thats pretty stupid that it only has 2mb when you buy it and its that cheap.

By mpc3000 Tue Jun 17, 2003 1:42 pm
"Thats pretty stupid that it only has 2mb when you buy it and its that cheap."

Not really seeing how the when this hardware was designed memory chips were over $10 MB. In order for a company to include the extra memory they would have had to sign a contract to buy thousands of chips at that price at that time (that is how it works). This would have permanently kept the price of the MPC a few hundred dollars higher. Akai is not in the memory business.

I say Kudos to Akai with the forsight to use off the shelf parts. I am sure there are people around here that remember Akai's (and other manufacturere's) older samplers used proprietary memory which still costs $25 meg. That hundreds of dollars to load up one sampler to the max.