I can break down the Drums pack I created from the Jupiter Rising expansion. I’ve got it all in a folder called Jupiter Rising - Drums. This contains:
- All the samples used in the expansion.
- The .xpm file for the MPC program.
- A JPG of the expansion art for the browser.
- An Expansion.xml file containing all the expansion details.
- A [Previews] folder with the .wav file the browser will use to preview the expansion.
Here’s the full contents of the xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<expansion version="1.0">
<identifier>com.akaipro.mpc.expansion.jupiterrising-drum</identifier>
<title>Jupiter Rising - Drum</title>
<manufacturer>Akai Professional</manufacturer>
<version>1.0.2.0</version>
<type>drum</type>
<img>com.akaipro.mpc.expansion.jupiterrising-drum.jpg</img>
<directory>com.akaipro.mpc.expansion.jupiterrising-drum</directory>
<separator>-</separator>
</expansion>
The only relevant info here is that the preview jpg is named com.akaipro.mpc.expansion.jupiterrising-drum.jpg - matching the value of the img tag.
Everything else - the identifier and directory tags - I just edited to add ‘-drum’ to the end (and similar with the title tag). Of course I had to pare this down from the XML file and contents in the full Jupiter Rising expansion, which took some initial effort - but if you’re starting from scratch, you could use the above as a template instead.
The MPC program and wav files didn’t need to be referenced in the XML file - the MPC just finds and lists them in the browser automatically. So my JR - Bass folder contains over 600 samples and multiple xpm files, but the XML file is basically the same as the one above - it just has the expansion metadata.
When I’d finished this I just copied the Jupiter Rising - Drums folder to the Expansions folder on my MPC card (and my Force card), but my understanding is I could also zip it and rename the file from .zip to .xpn to create a pack - I think this is mainly for use with the MPC desktop software, but I could be wrong there.
Hopefully that all makes sense, but happy to try to answer any questions. I can’t distribute the example above but I’m sure I could make an example expansion that I could upload if that’d be helpful.
Edit: Here are the folder contents in Finder - there are just a dozen or so additional .wav files after the end that I’ve cut off to save space:
