thawkins

I've had a feeling for a while that this was inevitable. I mean just look at them, they scream 80s. It's either that or someone's figured out how to mine bitcoins with it.

I believe there's still a healthy market for a larger, more 'breathable' UI / layout... some people are tired of the tiny objects trend. Honestly, after watching a video of Cuckoo showcasing an unfinished OP-Z, it looks painfully small.. of course, that doesn't detract from the tremendous functionality of the thing, it just doesn't look very playable--it looks fiddly as f*ck. My personal dumb metric is "does it fit nicely in my backpack along with a laptop. To my eyes, the tr-8 has an absolutely comically huge footprint - 40x26cm compared to the tr-08's 30x13, that's like 2.6x difference. I haven't actually had a chance to play around on either, but the tr-08 size format seems super nice from what I have seen in the stores. Things like Volcas, the Pocket Operators are definitely too small though. I would probably have a different opinion if for the last 2 years I had not been fighting the gods of studio feng shui to fit my gear nicely on what's mostly a 90x50cm IKEA shelf. Of course there's materials savings in all aspects from manufacture to transport in there as well if you think from that perspective.

I have seen the tr-8 and it's a really physically huge thing which I don't think needs to be in this day and age. Since I have been looking for inspiration in building my own DIY drum machine/sequencer thing on top of the Livid Code I have been looking at a lot of videos. I caught a glimpse of the tr-08 and tr-09 in a couple of videos and these seem like really nice devices in terms of usability. If they only had some SD card reader so you could load your own samples it would be golden though.

This is cool, I might implement it in Pure Data. I found a description of the working principles here https://hackaday.com/2018/03/02/basic-sequencer-for-your-synth-rack/

I enjoyed watching this yesterday, some good points about not trusting USB and knowing your gear but in my opinion this guy has 4x too much stuff on his desk. I guess it makes sense if you want quick access to every piece of sound generation.

I could swear I found this video from watmm, but

Limited edition of 40, so I guess that makes sense.....? Why not just make a limited edition of 1 for $1.4 million? That would be a very Residents move. Damn now I regret not seeing them when they were playing here a couple of months ago

You mean 100m? 500 was announced in 2015. RSP's time traveler cover blown.

Limited edition of 40, so I guess that makes sense.....? Why not just make a limited edition of 1 for $1.4 million? Wanna bet there is going to be a second run if turns out to be popular? Or if not the whole thing, maybe just "mass produce" the modules.

hey guys wanna buy a moog modular? only $35k https://www.moogmusic.com/products/modulars/synthesizer-iiip

I get your point though, because even if it is free now it is not guaranteed to be free forever. If it becomes good and popular, someone can just come and buy them out, take down the code repositories and institute some price gouging plans or something. I better copy that source before just in case. :)

At this point I am not even looking towards buying a software module, although if I get really into it who knows. But what I really like about this thing already is that they have made it open source so I already can just take the code and make my own stuff in it or mod existing things. This seems like a wonderful way to get into some C++ without having to wizard up the whole framework from scratch. I just hope using the thing does not metastasize into a full blown eurocrack habit.

Finally played around with the thing today. I think I have some sampling rate issues and maybe Soundflower is not the best thing to use to get the audio to Live, but fuck damn it was fun to mess around. I did not really know what I was doing most of the time and when I finished all the cords were a huge jungle and I could not understand what goes where anymore.

https://soundcloud.com/stream

I did some feng shui to kill off the GAS from all those desktop semi-modulars. Hopefully it's as fun to play this setup as it is to look at it.

I am liking this new trend of semi-modulars.

Good point, I already feel that way about Eurorack as it is. I want modern Eurorack functionality in a big, 500 series 1/4" monstrosity. This will definitely be an issue even though there is a "knob side" and a "plug side", so that you never actually have to reach into a cable forest to twiddle anything.

The ratio of surface-area to utility is pretty high on this one. Would pair nicely with my field kit. If they'd make those drum modules capable of real-time sampling instead of requiring you to disassemble the thing, it would be pretty sweet.

Yes, please stop posting about OT or any other stand-alone workstation things that can be used for the IDMs. Ugh fuck that Pico system looks really nice. 1120€ though..

Update on playing with the Livid Code. After three days of messing around and writing my own remote script, it seems I got Live's mixers, sends, devices and even the clip launch session view thing working more or less. I already packed my old Launchpad away, but time will tell if the Code is actually usable for launching clips because it only has one LED for the encoder button, so once I stop a clip there's no way to see which slots are stopped and which are empty. There's probably a way to hack the encoder LEDs to show existing clips, but if it will require a lot of hackery, I am probably not going to bother. Next up is setting the big button to control encoder sensitivity, because 1to1 speed is way too slow for any more rapid changes. And I am probably also going to set up two buttons as means to change the channel so that I can instantly step out of Ableton mode to control any wacky Pure Data sequencers I might have running. In fact I probably need to set up a PD patch to have a sane way of sending program changes to my MicroX because fuck doing that through the MIDI clip. As for GAS, I got to agree with sweepstakes that I spend a lot more time worrying about the weekly beat than thinking about new gear. Now Gear Rearrangement Syndrome I can get behind.

I have spent a bunch of time with the editor (which comes as a web application you have to run in a browser with a MIDI plugin wtf :) ), so far the best I have achieved is increments of 2. I will give it another shot anyways, I probably missed some setting. As for live coding without a screen? Totally doable, have you seen the guys who play Tetris blind, as in not seeing the game board? So really my plan was just to set up the Pi with the Code and all other stuff, and remote desktop into it with my laptop, so I would "live-code" the patch but be able to play it during the coding and just be able to disconnect the laptop at any time and still continue playing.

I think this probably could have something to do with your operating system or the VCV rack not being real-time or the software just not being able to be in tune with itself to this extent. I don't think it would be easy to have two VCOs perfectly in tune on a physical modular either, because there is always some voltage fluctuation and it's basically impossible to have two knobs in the ideal same position?

mcbpete that stuff is amazing, I got to mess around with my VCV rack now that I have a computer that can handle it.

The starkness of that device is inviting, for sure. WIll be curious to hear how you get along with it. I like it a lot so far - it's USB class compliant and while it took a bit to go through the official documentation, I think I got it set up OK now. One snag is that I can't seem to configure it to be sensitive enough to output from 0 to 127 in increments of 1 (it's always 2 for some reason). I think I will just have to figure that out by looking harder at the editor and the docs. The Live script is smart enough for adjusting the speed and accuracy so no issues there really. But the greatest part is that now I have something with visual feedback and endless encoders to plug in to any PD patch on my Pi, so setting up some screen-less live-coding experimental stuff is only a matter of sitting down and doing it. It's nice and small so it passes the backpack test as well.

Got the Livid Code v2. Spent some time making sense of the official documentation (scattered around their wiki) and firmware updating and getting the browser based editor to work. I really like the form factor and all the leds and pushable encoders, but the default official Live script has no way of arming tracks or playing/recording clips so I guess it's time to get into programming again.