By mgofmc
Tue Oct 06, 2015 6:45 pm
This applies to any MPC that uses WAVs, so I think all of them except the MPC-3000. I've only got a 1000, so I'm posting here. Full disclosure: I'm just moving to using an MPC from using softsynths -- my last two albums were all softsynth based, but the next one will be (mostly) hardware. Coming to the MPC world, I'm kind of starting from scratch -- though it would be a lot of fun to make my own drum library from scratch, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to sample stuff I already have. I did some experiments hooking my Electribe to the MPC and sampling that -- it worked great, but it's lots of work and more hours than I could really throw at it to do it justice.
I happened upon a post somewhere on one of the Ableton boards where someone was asking how they could use Native Instruments Battery (the NI drum synth/drum-specific sample player VST/AU plugin) samples in a regular Ableton drum rack. The reply mentioned that Battery stores all its samples as WAVs. This gave a good clue as how to start.
I had a poke around and fairly quickly found out where the Battery library lived on my Mac:
/Users/Shared/Battery 3 Library
Not exactly well hidden, I suppose. Within that is a (huge) tree containing some Battery-specific stuff and a huge number of WAV files. A bit of investigation revealed that most were not in MPC-compatible formats. For the uninitiated, the MPC uses only 44.1k 16 bit WAVs -- mono or stereo is OK, so I needed to convert them.
Luckily, bash came to the rescue! That and sox. If you have MacPorts installed, you can install sox as follows
sudo port install sox
If you don't have MacPorts installed, you'd need to install that first. Next step was to cd to the root of the Battery library:
cd "/Users/Shared/Battery 3 Library"
The rest is a bash oneliner:
find . -name "*.wav" | while read i; do echo "$i"; mkdir -p "`dirname "/Users/sarah/DrumLib/$i"`"; sox "$i" -b 16 "/Users/sarah/DrumLib/$i" rate 44100; done
You'd want to replace 'sarah' with your own username. This command will traverse the whole tree and create a replica in your home directory called DrumLib that omits all of the Battery-specific stuff, but with all the WAVs converted for MPC use. Copy all of this to a CF card, chuck it in the MPC and it basically just works.
W00t!
PS: Don't ask me for a copy of the MPC version of the samples -- I'm pretty sure doing what I just did probably bends the rules a bit, but handing off copies would definitely not be kosher.
PPS: Doing this you end up with about 5GB of samples, something like 16000 individual files.
PPPS: I don't have Battery on a PC, but I would assume that you can probably use Cygwin and install sox from there and do essentially the same trick if you modify the file paths appropriately.
I happened upon a post somewhere on one of the Ableton boards where someone was asking how they could use Native Instruments Battery (the NI drum synth/drum-specific sample player VST/AU plugin) samples in a regular Ableton drum rack. The reply mentioned that Battery stores all its samples as WAVs. This gave a good clue as how to start.
I had a poke around and fairly quickly found out where the Battery library lived on my Mac:
/Users/Shared/Battery 3 Library
Not exactly well hidden, I suppose. Within that is a (huge) tree containing some Battery-specific stuff and a huge number of WAV files. A bit of investigation revealed that most were not in MPC-compatible formats. For the uninitiated, the MPC uses only 44.1k 16 bit WAVs -- mono or stereo is OK, so I needed to convert them.
Luckily, bash came to the rescue! That and sox. If you have MacPorts installed, you can install sox as follows
sudo port install sox
If you don't have MacPorts installed, you'd need to install that first. Next step was to cd to the root of the Battery library:
cd "/Users/Shared/Battery 3 Library"
The rest is a bash oneliner:
find . -name "*.wav" | while read i; do echo "$i"; mkdir -p "`dirname "/Users/sarah/DrumLib/$i"`"; sox "$i" -b 16 "/Users/sarah/DrumLib/$i" rate 44100; done
You'd want to replace 'sarah' with your own username. This command will traverse the whole tree and create a replica in your home directory called DrumLib that omits all of the Battery-specific stuff, but with all the WAVs converted for MPC use. Copy all of this to a CF card, chuck it in the MPC and it basically just works.
W00t!
PS: Don't ask me for a copy of the MPC version of the samples -- I'm pretty sure doing what I just did probably bends the rules a bit, but handing off copies would definitely not be kosher.
PPS: Doing this you end up with about 5GB of samples, something like 16000 individual files.
PPPS: I don't have Battery on a PC, but I would assume that you can probably use Cygwin and install sox from there and do essentially the same trick if you modify the file paths appropriately.