Weird MPC 500 Crash

So we all know how the story goes... gettin' yo groove on. Got some good samples that are starting to come together and then the unthinkable happens. The machine goes belly up.

Well in my case, I had just recorded a new sample, set 12 Levels to Tune and was about to knock out a new track. I hit overdub and play start, got the count in and once it started on the first bar no sounds were playing except the new notes I was hitting and the click track. By 2.2.x I had hit the stop button, but it was too late... total melt down, the overdub and play lights were stuck illuminated and the display had frozen up so no more interface inputs were being accepted. Had to power cycle to get it back to life. I'm still not sure what caused it... I'm running off of batteries as the unit I got off of ebay had the wrong power supply... but around 6.8v charge so I don't think that was it. Maybe I hit a pad too hard? Seems unlikely since I beat on this pretty regularly and never had this happen, but you never know.

Just curious if anybody else has experienced this and might know what causes this issue so I can avoid it in the future. The bummer is I was going to save just after laying down the newest sample... but I forgot the mantra save early and save often.

First serious burn from an MPC of any kind too... so not sure if congrats are in order or not... but now I can feel a small slice of some of the pain you other cats out there feel more regularly. Hope this isn't a trend for me though.

And yes... I am on the latest OS 1.31 or whatever it is.

i know exactly what your goin thru. same thing happen to me, but i just turned my off completely and like 5 mins later turned it back on and no problems since (this was like 2 months ago). i did lose everything that wasnt saved, but it taught me to save my shit more often in case something like that does happen again.

Yep, thats the thing I hate. So far that happened to me twice in my 4yrs with it and I'm on OS 1.13.

First time it crashed was because I was banging the pads so hard that it shook the 128 MB RAM out its place while I was putting together a sequence. I turned it off and then on and an error message popped up. So I reinstalled the RAM again and it was fine again. The second time was a freak accident, I was just chopping up numbers and the machine froze. I unplugged it and let it rest for an hour, and then it worked fine.

Sometimes I think there's just too much sh!t in this little box than it can handle. Can anyone get it to play all its 32 polyphony without a glitch? After like 12 it gets wonky.

NearTao wrote:So we all know how the story goes... gettin' yo groove on. Got some good samples that are starting to come together and then the unthinkable happens. The machine goes belly up.

Well in my case, I had just recorded a new sample, set 12 Levels to Tune and was about to knock out a new track. I hit overdub and play start, got the count in and once it started on the first bar no sounds were playing except the new notes I was hitting and the click track. By 2.2.x I had hit the stop button, but it was too late... total melt down, the overdub and play lights were stuck illuminated and the display had frozen up so no more interface inputs were being accepted. Had to power cycle to get it back to life. I'm still not sure what caused it... I'm running off of batteries as the unit I got off of ebay had the wrong power supply... but around 6.8v charge so I don't think that was it. Maybe I hit a pad too hard? Seems unlikely since I beat on this pretty regularly and never had this happen, but you never know.

Just curious if anybody else has experienced this and might know what causes this issue so I can avoid it in the future. The bummer is I was going to save just after laying down the newest sample... but I forgot the mantra save early and save often.

First serious burn from an MPC of any kind too... so not sure if congrats are in order or not... but now I can feel a small slice of some of the pain you other cats out there feel more regularly. Hope this isn't a trend for me though.

And yes... I am on the latest OS 1.31 or whatever it is.

Yo that happened to me yesterday too... didn't post about it because I figured it was one of those OS bugs.


I actually reloaded a project, added an extra sample from a keyboard- pressed record to lay down the track and it froze up. The paly green light and red record light were still on but I couldn't do anything. Had to power down.

Ill-Green wrote:...
First time it crashed was because I was banging the pads so hard that it shook the 128 MB RAM out its place while I was putting together a sequence....

I was kinda figuring it might be something like this. Maybe those batteries rattling around in there or something.

IMO you should really get an AC adaptor. They are not very expensive on ebay if you look around.

Looks like 10 bucks including S&H.
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=12+vol ... rom=&_ipg=

robthom wrote:

Ill-Green wrote:...
First time it crashed was because I was banging the pads so hard that it shook the 128 MB RAM out its place while I was putting together a sequence....

I was kinda figuring it might be something like this. Maybe those batteries rattling around in there or something.

IMO you should really get an AC adaptor. They are not very expensive on ebay if you look around.

Looks like 10 bucks including S&H.
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=12+vol ... rom=&_ipg=

Thanks for the heads up but I always use the AC. The only time I use batteries is when I want to show off to the kids in the park. Great convo piece for the ladies I must admit

Ill-Green wrote:First time it crashed was because I was banging the pads so hard that it shook the 128 MB RAM out its place while I was putting together a sequence. I turned it off and then on and an error message popped up. So I reinstalled the RAM again and it was fine again. The second time was a freak accident, I was just chopping up numbers and the machine froze. I unplugged it and let it rest for an hour, and then it worked fine.

Man, must've been a pretty intense beat to knock the ram out! Though I will admit that I have thought about putting a couple of strategic drops of hot glue to keep that sucker in but still possible to pop it off and replace if necessary.

Ill-Green wrote:Sometimes I think there's just too much sh!t in this little box than it can handle. Can anyone get it to play all its 32 polyphony without a glitch? After like 12 it gets wonky.

I might've been around 18-20. Is there a quick way to tell what polyphony you are at (like in JJOS it's under the option mode) on the MPC500... I've always just kind of guessed but that's not really any good for anybody. Suppose I should read the manual again to see if it's in there.

why the hell would u need to bang pads that hard?

set the velocity levels to 0 so u dont ruin it man

Ill-Green wrote:
Thanks for the heads up but I always use the AC. The only time I use batteries is when I want to show off to the kids in the park. Great convo piece for the ladies I must admit

Actually the link and suggestion was meant for tao, but it was kind of confusing the way that I said it. I was building off of what you said.

Yeah, beats in the park is awesome. Thats why I got the 5 instead of the 1000 even though they were around the same price.