MPC 500 - Showing "insufficient memory".

Recently i purchased 4 MPC 500 for my company. I've managed to load all the tracks to my SD card which is 2 GB. But if I assign it to the Pads its prompting me "insufficient memory". And I've lost my patience in troubleshooting. Could anyone provide your expertise in this?

Well are the units maxed at 128MB or do they have the stock 16MB?

And also are we talking about a huge amount of MIDI/Sequence data here? You can run out of that in addition to coming up short on sample memory to load audio files into.

Thanks for the reply,

I have the stock 16MB.

The 2GB worth of files in my CF card is all music tracks in 16 bit wav file.

So does that mean that The MPC 500 can only load files into the RAM before

onto the pads? Or can I skip the RAM and load straight from CF cards?

Everything has to go into whatever RAM is available, there is no streaming audio from the CF storage, like Lampdog mentioned.

Due the that it's more the norm to have smaller pieces of audio either bar loops or single drums/one shots and then use MIDI to trigger those in sequences. Then have "x" amount of sequences/variations arranged in song mode to have complete productions of normal song durations like 3-6 minutes.

Even with the max 128MB you'd probably still hit the wall quick trying to load long WAVS as you attempted to do off the CF card in the limited RAM, even the silence between sounds in those WAVS is eating precious memory.

It's a different way of working compared to hardware that can stream audio tracks of an HD or removable storage as the design concept goes back to 1988 when sample memory was limited to 16 and 32MB totals. With MIDI trigger a small amount of audio in different permutations was really the only solution to doing full songs in one box, the whole basic concept of an MPC.

Even into the final hardware MPC's from 2002-2008 this design concept remained constant with RAM totals of 512MB, 128MB, and 192MB on the last 5 hardware MPC's that were made.

It's not hard to adapt to this style of working even though I'm guessing it's the dead opposite of what you're used to given your original post and having the long WAV stems from however you were working prior to these MPC's getting acquired.

The first way would be to try and get the single drums and smaller loops that you made your tracks on the CF from, and make MPC Programs of those so you can use it's MIDI sequencing to recreate the tracks. The upside to that is the MPC is very organic and hands on, so it would be easy to add new variations to the tracks or even make whole new stuff out of the source sounds.

The second way, and I don't know if your plan is to use them MPC's completely by themselves in lieu of whatever you used to make the tracks you mentioned...is the fact that you can have the sounds on a computer or possibly in any MIDI enabled keyboards and stuff you may have used to make the tracks and use the MPC as the "MIDI brain" of the operation and have it's MIDI sequences and tracks send MIDI out to the external stuff and record to a computer DAW program or maybe a HD recorder.

But yeah. if you have no prior experience with MPC's the modern ones having much more storage on the CF card than available internal RAM can be confusing, as well as maybe not knowing how MPC's are based in an older MIDI centered way of working like I mentioned earlier.

The Akai branded RAM is a ripoff, and you can easily use old laptop RAM instead for much cheaper.

This is the spec you need - PC 133 144PIN CL3 SODIMM 256MB.

Two things to note here, it MUST be CL3 (clock latency rating) or it will not work even if all other specs match. Now some sticks won't be labeled and you'll luck out and they will be CL3 sticks. But unless you have a box of sticks from a computer geek friend or whatever where you're not paying to roll the dice, just make sure to only buy sticks that have CL3 on the spec label.

The second thing is it has to a 256MB stick, even though the MPC will only utilize 128MB. It's just the weird way Akai did it on the 500/1000/2500 RAM upgrade. By design the machines only read half the dual inline RAM chips on the stick.

If you buy a 128MB stick with the right specs you're only going to get 64MB.

Getting old laptop RAM is only going to cost you $5-$20 a stick at most.

I hope this all helps and hope that even though the MPC's design may not be what you expected you still might want to adapt your workflow to the machine's style. They're great fun and still very capable once you do tailor your flow to machine's limits. They more than make up for it in how versatile they are and as I had mentioned are a really fun way to work that make a sampler really feel like an instrument.

Thanks for reply.............

Anytime sir. The forum has years of archives to help, and any other questions will surely get answered, there's plenty of 500 users here and there's plenty that's common to any MPC.

I dont know if nukai is fooling around,
but I had an early one with the small font...

No problem.

My buddy bought a last one with the big font,
couldn't trasnfer any files between them without the insufficient memory malfunction.

I even put my horrendously over-priced official nukai mem stick in his,
same thing.

We sent it back for repair,
they said nothing was wrong with it.

The 500 needs hacking bad.

thomrob wrote:The 500 needs hacking bad.

Too bad JJ didn't survive the Numark change over. He could have waited and stole more OS code bases.

But sadly anyone who even could get the source code and have the skills to upgrade it would get sued in half a second by In Music Group.

The JJ thing was so particular and Akai knew they could not sell the 1000/2500 past the first 2 years they were out without just looking the other way on JJ.

It's probably likely too that JJ documented whatever rumored foulness Akai burnt him on and could have counter sued, so they just let him recoup by never pursuing legal action against him.