Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000

By infinitcash Mon Feb 28, 2005 6:36 am
noone concurs?

By nanoloop Mon Feb 28, 2005 7:00 am
i think i have version 1.14c
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By ^Owni Mon Feb 28, 2005 12:24 pm
Hmmm i really hope this is true.. can someone verify/confirm this??!

By infinitcash Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:07 pm
maybe its just s1000 samples. seems to be a little bit faster, but its wierd 1 part of the mpc says 1.14, and the other says 1.20

By mpc3000 Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:17 am
"maybe its just s1000 samples."

The type of files has a significant impact on the load times. WAV take longer to load than SND. Older native S-series formats may have faster or slower times, but I have not tested.

By lo-fi Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:52 pm
I did a test this morning on OS 1.14 with my IDE cardreader and a 10mb WAV file. It loaded in a tedious 55 seconds, even though the card and reader are capable of much, MUCH faster load times (5mb/s specified by the card manufacturer).

Just to test your proposition I updated to 1.2 just now. No change whatsoever, same card, same file, same time. Bummer. There is still a chance that there is an improvement for multiple smaller files, or .snd files. But I'm not going back to OS 1.14 to test that, I'll just see if it feels faster.

The greatest improvement in save/load speeds was when I started sampling at 45rpm!

By Sander Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:51 pm
I did a test. (same IDE reader as Lo-Fi)

Filesize 3146KB

MPC1000, OS 1.7 loadtime 3 sec

MPC2KXL, OS 1,11, 1.14 and 1.20 loadtime 19 sec :(

I wondering what the load time would be of a SCSI zipdrive (mine is broken).
I could try it from my external SCSI cdrom some time.

And would the SCSI cardreader be faster.

For the test I used the Akai 32 MB compactflash card that came with my mpc1000.

By mpc3000 Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:37 am
"Filesize 3146KB "

What type of file? For each machine? Like already mentioned, the type of file has a significant impact on certain MPC models.

"I did a test this morning on OS 1.14 with my IDE cardreader and a 10mb WAV file. It loaded in a tedious 55 seconds, even though the card and reader are capable of much, MUCH faster load times (5mb/s specified by the card manufacturer)."

I am not sure if that is a fair test of the XL. Loading an SND file may be a better test. Loading WAV places a bit of overhead in the MPC's processor since it has to convert it to SND format in memory. This will slow the load time. I did some IDE/SCSI CF/HD testing a few years ago and I am not even sure if I still have the data around.

If you want to test different OS versions on the XL, I think you can hold PLAY and it will boot from disk instead of from flash. That way you can avoid burning out the flash.

By Sander Fri Mar 04, 2005 10:44 am
Yes, I used a wave file too.

By lo-fi Fri Mar 04, 2005 3:53 pm
mpc3000 wrote:"I did a test this morning on OS 1.14 with my IDE cardreader and a 10mb WAV file. It loaded in a tedious 55 seconds, even though the card and reader are capable of much, MUCH faster load times (5mb/s specified by the card manufacturer)."

I am not sure if that is a fair test of the XL. Loading an SND file may be a better test. Loading WAV places a bit of overhead in the MPC's processor since it has to convert it to SND format in memory. This will slow the load time. I did some IDE/SCSI CF/HD testing a few years ago and I am not even sure if I still have the data around.


Yeah, after I converted the WAV to SND I could save/load it in 24 seconds. Still more than ten times what it should be though.

By mpc3000 Sat Mar 05, 2005 12:29 am
"Still more than ten times what it should be though."

There is not any CF cards made that support 5Mb/sec. In fact, 99% of them can only do 600kb/sec. There are a select few that handle a slightly higher transfer rate and those are described in great detail at the Electrix Pro website (the second after me to ever use CF technology in musical gear).

The CF reader "in theory" can support 5 mb/sec, but again you would need CF/SD cards that support that, and there are not any that do.

By lo-fi Sun Mar 06, 2005 4:20 am
Oh.

Then why do SanDisk claim 20mb/s minimum speed for their latest generation of cards here, and why do Apacer claim 4mb/s read & 5mb/s write for my particular card right here?

And the card reader's manufacturer claims 16mb/s for the reader.

By nanoloop Mon Mar 07, 2005 2:05 am
maybe they are just seek times foer the reader itself. doesnt take into account the time it takes to travel from there thru the mpc into memory.

By mpc3000 Mon Mar 07, 2005 3:28 am
I see the high speed cards, but I am a little wary of the advertised transfer rates. It is much like disk manufacturers advertising a high transfer rate, but it is only for burst reads/writes and not for sustained data. Sure you can slam a 4 meg file in a fraction of a second, but I guarantee that writing a 30 meg file is not going to perform really much better than the current cards.

Try some research:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_ ... p?cid=6007

The very cards you mentioned seem to only have about 1.5 meg/sec transfer rate, a mere fraction of their advertising. Figures. Even so, the the early 90's SCSI interface of the MPC is likely not going to sustain anything near that, even if the MPC OS was optimized to do so (and I know for a fact it is not designed with high transfer in mind).