INSUFFICIENT MEMORY!!!

I tried to slice a sample and that error message came up.I dont even have that many samples in my mpc!So instead of using slice,i maually cut and discarded the sample 4 times until i had 4 chopped up segments of the sample.These samples saved fine, so what was the difference between me manually chopping the sample instead of having it sliced and getting the error message?Is my mpc lying to me?

do you have the 129 memory extension ?

what is the size of your sample ? ( in Ko)

do you have the default factory songs loaded ?

My son is having the same problem. I thought the problem was too little RAM, but when it boots up it says he has 128MB installed, so it can't be that. Any reason why it would give an insufficient memory error message when he tries to slice, pitch shift, time stretch, etc.? He has a 256MB Compact Flash card, though i didn't think the size of the CF card would impact this. Any help would be very much appreciated... Thanks.

wait

let me get this straight - you're asking this for your son?

....


you are an awesome mother.

what ram did you put in there?

have you tried formatting the mpc internal memory?

Antonym wrote:wait

let me get this straight - you're asking this for your son?

....


you are an awesome mother.

or father, perhaps? Hey, it's a good clean hobby so I like to encourage him.... thanks.

mark

Antonym wrote:what ram did you put in there?

have you tried formatting the mpc internal memory?

Well we went out and bought what was recommended on this site, but then we noticed that when it booted up it said it had 128 installed (he bought it on eBay). So i opened it up and found it had Akai memory in it, and it says at boot up it has 128, so I assume it's OK.

I haven't tried formatting the internal memory -- i saw that on the forum but wasn't sure what that would do. Should we do this?

I can tell you this -- he can slice when he uses a very small sample -- he has the problem when he is trying it on an enitre song. Do you have to "pre-cut" them down to smaller size before slicing, and if so, how small? Sorry, I have looked on the forum buit couldn't find a definitive answer.... it seems like you should be able to slice from an entire song, not just a part of it, but what do I know?

Thanks.

@Qoorbal and msimpsonnj

For some of the edit operations, I have a hunch that the MPC makes copies of the sample in internal memory, and this can lead to what seems to be all your memory running out in short order, particularly if you have the standard 16MB of memory and are chopping long samples. That's a guess, though, so don't quote me on it.

In particular, I think that timestretch, patched phrase, pitchshift, and maybe even slice produces temporary copies of the sample. Basically any of the editing operations for which there's an 'undo' option.

@msimpsonnj:

You're right, the size of the CF doesn't have any bearing on this. How long are the samples that your son is trying to edit? Are they stereo?

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@msimpsonnj:

You're right, the size of the CF doesn't have any bearing on this. How long are the samples that your son is trying to edit? Are they stereo?[/quote]

I'll have to ask him when I get home, but I am going to guess that they ARE stereo, and although I don't know the size right now, he is trying to slice from an entire song -- let's say a 4-minute song for sake of example (I realize you probably want MB's, but I don't know right now -- sorry). It sounds to me like maybe you can't slice from an entire song, certainly not a stereo song? If this is true, what do you do?

Thanks again -- everyone on this forum is extremly helpful

Well, with 128Mb, according to the manual, you have about 24.5 minutes of memory for mono samples, so that would be about 12 and a quarter for stereo samples. So it looks like a single sample could be taking about one third of the available memory.

Assuming that some of these operations require extra copies of the data for part-way results and the final result, you could easily chew up the whole memory very quickly.

My advice is for him to sample smaller sections of the song and slice the smaller segments - that would likely make his life much easier, since I'm sure it's a lot of zooming and scrolling to get down to the resolution he wants to get a second or so of the song as a sample.

If he's chopping whole songs that he's transferred onto the CF card from a PC, I'd advise doing some chopping of the song into smaller chunks on the PC first. Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) is a handy freeware PC sample editor that can do the trick (it's also available for Mac OS X and Linux).

Hope that helps.