New To Site Not that new to the MPC But got a Question

Hey whats the deal everybody. Just wanted to say whats up. Looks like there are some very skilled people here so here comes my question. I am not that new to the MPC but I used Reason and Cubase for the longest. I have gotten a little bored with that so I figured I would get hot and heavy on the MPC. I have the 2000xl. A gang of floppies with drums and other samples on them. I looked at buying the external ZIP but I think I will wait until I get home for that. I think I can freak the floppies. I have a EMU 25 key midi controller also. I know the basics on the MPC as far as laying stuff down. I was just going to chop my samples up on Cubase and save them to the floppy and then import them into my MPC. It have a F'd up set up because the laptop I have has no Floppy drive on it so I have to put the samples on a memory stick take them to my other Laptop and then save the to FLoppy. I have reason and cubase loaded on the laptop with no floppy drive and my other laptop is my work laptop so I cant load any programs on it due to the fact that the government owns it. I also have an EMU1616m laptop soundcard that I cant use because the laptop I have does not have a PCMCIA slot. But my work laptop does but again I cant load anything on it. I know everyone says that you can use the MPC standalone but I am used to using it with a turntable to grab my samples. I really dont want to get my turntables sent over for the simple fact that I dotn trust the US Postal Service and I dont want my stuff getting here all messed up. Plus that means if I send the turntable I got get wax shipped too and I wont be here for that long to get all that sent to me because then I have to pay to get it sent back. But I cant go without making tracks or I will go crazy over here. It sort of calms me. Trees do to but I cant do that while I am here so I gotta depend on the music. I am inspired by DJ Premeir mostly but I love J-Dilla....ALC.....Beatminerz......DR Period and many others. To get to my question here it goes:

CAN I GET DOWN WITH THE SETUP I HAVE.....I have no problem with reading the manual. I just want to know that with the midi controller and the MPC is that a good enough set-up to get down with. I have never had an MPC setup before so I just had that simple question. Appreciate it and appreciate any tips that you guys could give me... Thanks.......[/img]

For starters that setup is absolutely fine but if I can give you a word of advice; if you were to buy a zip drive I would suggest you to look into and internal card reader instead, since they're waaay more reliable and have higher storage capacity and are less prone to wear since they contain no moving parts.

Appreciate that.....Now where could i find a good card reader? I have actually never used a card reader either so what can this provide me with? Does it allow me to store crazy samples and things on it?

http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=20082&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Contains a howto I wrote which also contains a link to the site where I bought my cf cardreader.

Appreciate that...I'll check it out.

Okay so I understand the use of a card reader....I will probably have to buy some cards right? I figure it doesnt come with. I mean how many cards does one need? I have thosands of samples. Just one and clean it up everytime I use it? Let me know. I mean I have no problems with the floppies although they dont store alot and you have go through like 90 of them before you can find that kick you been looking for.

Wel you can store up to 2Gigbytes of samples on 1 CF card, 1 floppy (HD) can contain 1.44 MegaBytes 1 GigaByte is 1024 Megabytes so go figure how many floppies you will save . Also keep in mind that the data on floppies doesn't last forever, floppies are actually one of the least viable storage media.

this may be off topic a bit ... but after you load the samples onto the card reader can you trigger them from the card reader as well ... like use them as the ram inside the MPC... or.. do you still have to load them into internal memory to sequence them .... i was looking into those card readers .. this point is a bit unclear about them .. because if you can trigger the sounds from the cards .. it would be well worth haveing a few cards with different sets on them ..and just swap cards like sound banks ... is this possible

Kinda not on topic, but it might help you out. Since you can't (logically) validate shipping your TT and Wax, you should have your peeps back home e-mail you samples. One-shots and drums aren't big files.

Peace1

all u really need is a 256 mb card. get a cheap 9 in 1 card reader for ur computer and archive everything onto the pc. thats what i do. all i use is a 32 mb card to save & transfer. cheap, simple and quite effective.