a feature I'm looking for

wow I am going to try that .mid trick. If that works it would be sweet. Once I get the midi data into Sonar all I would need to do is rerecord each midi track as audio.

There's no reason why it wouldn't. You can actually load any standard MIDI file into the MPC, so you can do certain things on the computer first, and just use the MPC to play back sequences in a live situation if you want. The only problem you'll come into is making sure that, for drum programs, you're sequencing the events on the right keys to correspond with your programs. Just a case of remembering what MIDI note number corresponds to what pad, though.