#8

Agreed - and he somehow continues to do so!

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#9

The thing about JJOS is that he started with the original source code. It’s not really a hack or a mod, it’s just continued development of the original firmware. And the MPC1k is 100% defined by software and has a fairly generic (extensible) user interface, so there are very few constraints on what you can do with it, as long as the OS fits in the memory. A lot of synths like that could be absolute beasts if a creative individual was allowed to put an extra few years into the firmware.

Also, he is basically free from all the usual business concerns that a company might have that sort of prevent them from putting so many years into an old platform. He doesn’t have to worry about whether to make new hardware, and whether features will steal sales from other/newer products. All he can do is make the software better. It’s very different to the way music instrument companies used to think about themselves (make a new box every few years), but if you look at what Akai are doing with the new MPCs, there are a lot of similarities.

Tangentially, if you look at the enormous creativity that open-ended products like norns or organelle engender, you do have to wonder what would have happened if the dying E-mu or Akai had open sourced the OS for one of their later model samplers…

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#10

@petesasqwax Re: single cycle waveforms, here’s 1000s of them

and here’s one based on the Joy Division ‘Unknown Pleasures’ cover waveform :smiley:

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#11

Ha! Amazing! I did find the Adventure Kid waveforms but I have barely even begun to go through them all! I’ll load that one up and have a play with it :slightly_smiling_face:

#12

Did somebody say single cycle waveforms?

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#13

There is a fella hacking the firmware for the Roland MV8000 here…https://www.mv-nation.com/index.php?topic=227.msg2299;topicseen#msg2299 Looks like it is very much early days.

I’ve got a hacked firmware on my vacuum. I installed a spotify client so it can play “sadie the cleaning lady” while it vacuums. Any suggestions for other cleaning related songs for the playlist would be much apprecietated.

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#14

Oh, wow, that’s fantastic!

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#15

Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean”? (I have to confess that I didn’t expect hacking a vacuum cleaner to make an appearance when I started this thread but I’m very pleased it did!)

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#16
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#17

Did anybody use rockbox back in the day? It was pretty amazing that you could turn a $20 mp3 player into something that could play everything from FLAC to MOD to Doom WADs.

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#18

I use rockbox exclusively on my iPod and have done for years, and having flacs available is a real boon as that’s my preferred format. It’s fantastic.

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#19

Aguanile = clean your house

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#20

I have to confess: I never bothered much with FLAC because, on the occasions that I could hear the difference between a FLAC and a 320kbps MP3, I never minded the pay off of slight loss of clarity over space on my MP3 player

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#21

Hell yeah, teenage me had to play DOOM on his MP3 player!

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#22

I have often looked for sp-404sx custom firmware. One or two official updates have been released, I wonder if they could be reverse engineered to allow for firmware which would address changes the sp404 community’s have long desired.

#23

I’ve tried looking into this as well but got nowhere. From my very limited experience with binwalk it seems that most of the firmware is encrypted so I’m not sure if it’d be possible (tho I could be completely wrong).

I’m also a big fan of JJOS (which I have running on my MPC 1000) and it’d be great to make something similar for the 404.

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#24

Fortunately I have a 160GB iPod classic, so space was never much of a problem - the main advantage for me is not having to think about converting formats, but just moving over whatever the file happens to be saved as - and moreover by just copying and pasting in a file browser and no tedious mucking about with iTunes (which I can’t run on Linux anyway) or various sub-optimal kludges. It’s the only Apple device I own, and I’d have given up on it yonks back if it wasn’t for sensible third-party firmware.

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#25

That makes a lot of sense. I’ve never had an issue with iTunes, despite how irritating it can be, purely because I use iOS devices for music making and having iTunes on my PC means I can store local backups of apps that sometimes disappear from the store never to be seen again (I had to track down a business or enterprise edition for this feature but it’s gold!)

On a side note, there’s something quite fun about seeing familiar phrases like “mucking” and “yonks” and suspecting that you had to be a fellow Brit!

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#26

Could the firmware be compressed and not encrypted? I hear the two can look similar. I think 404 has the ability to compress and uncompress files, I noticed the back up save feature crates a compressed file in the 404’s files system. It would make sense to me for an update to be compressed for the download and then uncompressed on the unit itself. If this is true, cracking the firmware might just require figuring out what kind of file compression the 404 uses.

#27

That’s a good point. I was under the impression that the back up files were just a concatenation of the different sample and project files into a single .bin but it makes sense that there’s some compression going on.

I’ll see if I can find some info on it online. Maybe someone has already figured it out and shared it on github or somewhere else.

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