Post your questions, opinions and reviews of the MPC1000. This forum is for discussion of the OFFICIAL Akai OS (2.1). If you wish to discuss the JJ OS, please use the dedicated JJ OS forum
By paula abdul Sat Oct 18, 2008 11:21 pm
I'm playing in a band and I want to get an MPC to load our tracks into. The problem is that I doubt there will be enough memory to load the entire set at once (all the parts from 12 different songs), so I will have to load new songs in between the songs we play. How does it take if I have like 1GB of audio to load? 15 seconds on stage can be an eternity. Does anyone have any other suggestions for maximizing the load on the MPC for a whole set? Maybe the MPC1000 isn't a good solution for what I want to do?

I've been looking at the JJ OS but it doesn't seem to offer anything like Direct from Hard disk streaming.

Thanks.
By RexRhino Mon Oct 20, 2008 2:59 am
You can't load 1G of audio onto the MPC, but 128 megs takes too long to do it on stage, even if you are using the HD vs SmartCard which speeds things up significantly.

If you are open to changing up your arrangement, you should be able to do a lot of things to save memory and load in everything at once. For example, loops take up way more memory than individual drum hits, so if you are doing something like exporting your drum beats as loops from Reason or something, you can save lots of memory by exporting the individual sounds as small samples and sequencing it on the MPC. Same goes for a bass line loop or something like that, take an individual sample of bass and use the INST program from JJOS2 and program the notes directly into the MPC.

Remember, the main things that take up memory are long-ass samples. The power of the MPC is it's kick-ass sequencer, so to get the most out of the machine you should look to break larger samples to smaller samples and sequence them.

Some other things you can do to save memory is cut stereo samples down to mono (save 50% that way), or if they are already noisy or lofi sounding samples, try re-sampling at double speed, and then setting the pitch to half, essentially halfing the sampling rate and saving 50% of the memory.
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By M02 Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:43 pm
The other thing you can do, as well as trying to minimise memory usage, is to break the set up into sections on the MPC. So you only need to do 2 or 3 loads during the set. While you are doing the loads get the singer to talk shit or the drummer to do a solo... or they can play a short interlude that doesn't include mpc. get creatice.