MPC Kit Maker: Turn a Folder of Samples into MPC Drum Kits
MPC Kit Maker is out today for Mac. Point it at a folder of samples and walk away with MPC drum kits.
If you own an MPC, you know the chore. A new sample pack arrives, and before you can play a single kit you are naming pads, dragging files one at a time, and guessing which of the six snares belongs where. MPC Kit Maker does that part for you.
**It reads your file names** Drag a folder onto the window, subfolders and all. Every WAV, AIFF, and FLAC is scored against rules for twenty categories: kicks, snares, claps, rims, toms, hats, rides, crashes, percussion, shakers, cowbell, FX, bass, chords, melodic, vocal, and more. Names are matched as whole words, so Chord_Stab.wav is a chord and never a closed hat. Folder names count too, at half weight, which is how 003.wav inside a Kicks folder still lands on a kick pad. Anything genuinely ambiguous is marked unknown rather than filed wrong.
**Drums on the pads, samples fill the rest** Kicks, snares, hats, and cymbals land where your hands expect them. Bass, chords, and vocal chops take the pads that are left. The open hat is choked by the closed one, the way the hardware does it. Files named soft, med, and hard stack onto a single pad as velocity layers, up to eight deep, with even ranges and no gaps from 1 to 127.
**Same folder, same seed, same kit** Kit building is deterministic. The same folder with the same settings always builds the same kit, and typing a word into the seed field gives you a different, equally deliberate pick that you can reproduce next month. Shuffle picks is the same idea with a random seed.
**Native .xpm output** MPC Kit Maker never invents its file format. It starts from a real MPC drum program and swaps only the pad assignments. The built-in template is modeled on MPC 2 exports and works for most people. Hand it a program exported from your own machine and every kit comes back byte-for-byte native to it. The programs load on MPC One, MPC Live, MPC X, and MPC XL, and in the MPC 2 and MPC 3 desktop software.
Your library is only ever read. The samples a kit uses are copied into the new kit folder with clean, MPC-safe names. The originals are never moved, renamed, or rewritten.
**Pricing** The launch price is $25 for a perpetual license, down from the regular $50. UK customers pay £20 at launch and £40 regular. Buy at the launch price and it is yours forever, with free updates through the current major version. The app runs on macOS 12 or newer. A Windows build is on the roadmap.
