New MPC 2000 owner

Hi all,

I have a unexpanded MPC2000 on the way, got it for £300.. claims to be near mint and in good working order.

Now I need to figure out how to get stuff on it.. I already have a Zip 100 Drive and a SCSI card from dealing with vintage Macintosh. Need some clarification as to how things work however..


What Filesystem does the MPC 2000 read ? FAT16 ? FAT32 or other ? and if other how do i read and write to the ZIP disk on the PC ?

I understand the MPC 2000 reads Wav files ?

fat16 or just regular fat should be fine. it will read wav files fine. once you start saving stuff in the mpc, if you save 'AS SOUNDS' instead of wav, it will give you a small speed boost.

but wavs are totally fine.

the biggest most surprising gotcha, don't name your files anything over 8 characters. you can totally glitch the machine out and lose your files going between computer and mpc if you have files like that...

also, sometimes macs put 'hidden' files on the drive that will freak the mpc out. you've got to figure out a way to remove those if it does. just try it first.

finally, that zip will fail on you. one of your first upgrades should be looking into is better storage - either a card reader, a scsi2sd, or a floppy emulator. some people like other old formats like floppy or mo drives, but i would recommend going modern where you can.

and last but not least... the easiest way to convert samples into the format the 2000 reads is to simply sample it into the machine. It is a sampler / sequencer / instagram prop all in one.

Does the 8 character naming glitch only apply to samples as well as the .hfe files?

Also look into a hxc usb conversion they are very useful

the 8-character limitation is only for the mpc os. so if you are using hfe files with a floppy emulator, you are kind of bypassing the mpc os, so the limit shouldn't apply.

a floppy emulator is very different from a card reader so keep that in mind.