Safely Saving on the MPC 500: Do's and Don'ts

I've had my 500 for a week now and I'm trying to figure out how to work on it without encountering known bugs. My biggest problem at least was saving the contents of memory to already existing projects and attempting to overwrite them. I've learned that that's a no-no, and any time I do a memory dump I should make a new folder entitled -- say, "Party Beat FINAL" to distinguish it from the original project.

But how about when I want to just save new sequences or songs belonging to a project? Is it safe to just save a sequence and song by itself, assuming I don't overwrite any existing ones? I've learned to backup to my Mac, but I just want to save myself any future headaches . . .

The Crucials are that you save Everything with a unique name, and, either to it's own dedicated project folder or just loose on the flash card to be sorted (more visually) with the computer connected later.

separate project folders are really Key.

Yeah, today is the first day I think I've really figured it all out. I save everything to a new folder, then delete the old folder. Writing over previously existing folders seems like it creates problems . . .

Well, I have never experienced crashes with MPC saving Entire Memory to New Folder. I don't know why. Maybe, it's just luck.

But now I must say that it's not luck, really. I do save everything under a unique name (avoiding using default names like "New Folder", "Sequence01", "Project01" and so on). When I create a new folder, I always name it after a project (for easier backup to my laptop later). So, maybe that's because I had never had "CPU Addr" error message after saving a project (and even after overwriting same files there again and again).

Bedouin: It is safe to save only a sequence or a song, when you know that they use certain programs and samples. You can even save them separately to the same folder: programs and samples first, then - sequences (or vice versa). Then you can use "Load folder" function to load samples and programs, and afterwards load the sequence that uses them. If you happen to have an ALL Seq&Songs file in this folder, it will be loaded as well. But separate .seq files won't be loaded when loading a folder.

I'd also recommend to try "saving sequence as a MIDI file" function. That saves a sequence in the universal MIDI format, that you can later use with a DAW or load into other sequencing hardware.

More often than not, the saving bug affects sequences (and they are nothing but MIDI data actually). So, saving your sequences as MIDI files can help to retain that valuable MIDI information. Only be aware that saving a sequence as MIDI file can merge all tracks of the sequence in one and afterwards it would be difficult to sort out what is what.

You can, however, assign a different MIDI channel to every track and then demix the MIDI file in the DAW like Logic (which allows demixing MIDI note data by channel: it just separates note events that use different MIDI channels and puts them onto separate tracks in the arrange window).

Or, alternatively, you can save sequence MIDI data from tracks one by one: copy sequence to an unused sequence slot, then delete all tracks but one, and then save sequence as MIDI file, then copy original sequence once again, and so on, until you have a number of MIDI files, each containing event information from separate sequence tracks.

The only disadvantage of this saving technique is that Standard MIDI File format ignores MPC-specific data, which could be recorded as events onto tracks. But note events and timing (feel and groove) will be saved and that is what matters most, I guess.