a feature I'm looking for

so I just saw that the motif es has a cool feature called the mLan16. The mLAN16e lets you connect your Motif ES to your computer via mLAN (Firewire Music Networking) and communicate all of your MIDI and audio data via a single Firewire cable. I was wondering if their is anyway to do this or something similar on my mp.

Nah. Akai missed a trick with the mpc1k by making the USB interface just a way to get to the compact flash card. You plug the MPC into the USB on your computer and it basically turns it into a very expensive compact flash reader. Now, there are hardware firewire interfaces that will do pretty much the same thing, you plug your MIDI and audio connections into it and it'll feed them all to your computer via firewire (which, as I understand it, is pretty much what mLAN does, but is built into hardware instead of being a breakout box for your computer). There's nothing built into the MPC to do this, though, so you'd have to buy new hardware to be able to firewire all your data from the MPC to the computer, and you'd still have to use the USB in the MPC to transfer sample data to and from it.

I agree

the mpc1000's usb can in fact be used as master - we just don't have the software for it. how cool would it be for there to be an mpc1000 program on your computer that has a sequencer controlled by the mpc's step edit, visual representation s of what you're doing with the qlinks, and a wohle host of other cool on screen mpc1000 tricks?

i'd pay 300 dollars for it, but i'd probably bootleg it first from forum members

Antonym wrote:the mpc1000's usb can in fact be used as master

in order for that to happen you would need a different type of usb port on the back of the mpc. you would need the A-type port. the B-type end (which is currently on there) is only for devices, not as a host.

Antonym wrote:the mpc1000's usb can in fact be used as master - we just don't have the software for it. how cool would it be for there to be an mpc1000 program on your computer that has a sequencer controlled by the mpc's step edit, visual representation s of what you're doing with the qlinks, and a wohle host of other cool on screen mpc1000 tricks?

i'd pay 300 dollars for it, but i'd probably bootleg it first from forum members

no it cannot be used as a master. the mpc's CPU only supports slave USB operation.

sorry but this is really beginning to piss me off.

everyone on here assumes you can do ANYTHING, you can easily make a pirate OS, easily make a battery pack for the mpc. it is not easy.

see that's what i thought for a long time too, which confused me because recently i read from some typically informed source (i really honestly forget who but i think it had somenthing to do with stereoroid) that said the 1k had master potential....

and please drop your tone, man there's absolutely no harm in trying to put a battery into one's mpc...

as someone said in another topic, if you don't like what's on tv....

well the rest just comes naturally

From the Stereoroid website, who took the MPC apart and found the CPU: http://www.renesas.com/fmwk.jsp?cnt=sh7 ... 727_group/


USB host functionality is built into the CPU, looking at the specsheet, but as sparq wrote, the back of the MPC is only fitted with a type B "slave" port. Even if you could cannibalise 2 USB cables to make a type B to type B USB cable, and add sections to the OS to enable the chip's USB host mode (which is really not an easy task unless you're an expert in assembly language, have the source code to the normal OS to hand and a full instruction set specsheet and assembler program for the CPU), there's still no way to be sure that the USB port in the back is even wired to the CPU in such a way that it could act as a host.

damn, oh well. either i got it wrong from someone else or misread one of his posts from ages ago.

what a shame though - with the potential for usb these days i really wish akai had been a bit more savvy--1, to make it usb 2.0 (so many important things are 2.0 these days) and 2, to make it have master capability. what if it could slave the computer to the point where it sends all on-mpc info as i suggested in the earlier post? full pc-mpc compatability.

it would be really sick.

also, off topic, reason should make the mpc's qlinks controllers...

Antonym wrote:if it could slave the computer to the point where it sends all on-mpc info as i suggested in the earlier post? full pc-mpc compatability.

it would be really sick.

also, off topic, reason should make the mpc's qlinks controllers...

Although the MPC doesn't have a USB host port on the back, it does have 4 fully functioning MIDI ports, and I've seen a lot of very clever programs for other gear that have lots of real time MIDI functionality. I'm not sure of exactly what you have in mind, but having a graphical representation of the Q-Links is fairly easy to do, and although I can't figure a way to do it in real time, dumping sequences to and from a graphical sequence representation and your MPC is as simple as temporarily speeding up the tempo to maximum, playing one bar from the MPC and recording it to a simple sequencer program, then putting the tempo back to what it was, or vice versa. And because the sequence start/stop and tempo change commands are all MIDI commands, you could do it all from 1 mouse click inside the program, rather than manually having to do it all on the MPC. And all of this is reasonably simple programming that could be done in Java or whatever. My programming's a bit rusty, and I don't know enough about MIDI to do it, but I would figure it's possible to have fairly extensive computer editing of sequences through MIDI rather than fiddling around with OS code and wiring to try to get it USB host compatible

honestly that's an even better idea, but unfortuantely i have no coding ability

i'm only a petty graphic/audio designer

but this idea should be pushed

Antonym wrote:damn, oh well. either i got it wrong from someone else or misread one of his posts from ages ago

that could've been on the battery thread. i said that the cpu is capable of usb master operation, but yes, it does have to be implemented in software AND hardware, which is why i cried myself softly to sleep the night i read that. Akai, you lazy-ass-monkey-abusers.

ok so this post got a lottle bit off topic. Anyway I have too more questions now.
Do you guys see any of this happening in the near future?
How much do the hardware firewire interfaces taht Mu-tron cost? Any makes model that you recomend?
Thanks for the help. Once I get the do I might have to switch to that Motif ES, thats a pretty sick feature that it has on it.

Sonic2 wrote:ok so this post got a lottle bit off topic. Anyway I have too more questions now.
Do you guys see any of this happening in the near future?
How much do the hardware firewire interfaces taht Mu-tron cost? Any makes model that you recomend?
Thanks for the help. Once I get the do I might have to switch to that Motif ES, thats a pretty sick feature that it has on it.

The MIDI utility? It's possible, but it'd be a third party product or something made by a hobbyist, so I can't really say if I can see it happening or not, depends if someone with the skills to program one wants to do it enough. I very much doubt it would come from Akai, though, as these kinds of things aren't usually official.

As for the firewire interface, I've seen one for £100ish. Not sure what that is in your money, but that's about as cheap as they go. The thing with these is, though, that it's just using existing signals and transmitting them down a different kind of wire. The cheaper one you buy, the cheaper the A/D converters are going to be to convert your input signal to digital to go down the firewire line, and MIDI's MIDI, whether it's going down a firewire cable or a 5-pin DIN plug, and it's cheaper to get a semi-professional audio interface PCI card where you just use the traditional seperate MIDI and analogue audio cables to go into your computer. The firewire interfaces are mainly for laptops, where you can't plug PCI cards into. It's nice when it's already built into synths, but there's not much point in buying extra hardware to do the same job as a couple of MIDI cables and a double jack to mini stereo jack audio cable

Also, a way of editing sequences on a computer is kind of built into the MPC, albeit in a roundabout and less realtime way. Why not save all your sequences as .mid instead of .seq, which the 1000 lets you do, plug the USB in, load up the .mid in your favourite software sequencer straight from the CF card, do any edits you wish, save straight back onto the CF card, unplug the USB and reload the edited sequence back into your MPC? I've not tried it (though probably will if I want to do any complex, grid editing type stuff), but unless the MPC uses some weird kind of .mid file, it should work