Mannequins W/ 2.0

Olivier · 2020-07-03T00:45:57.455Z

Just installed and played with W/Del and W/Syn for a few minutes. Wow. UX feels pretty graspable even in the short amount of time I had, and the sounds were great. Looking forward to testing further.

glia · 2020-07-03T00:51:37.712Z

Cant wait to try this after dinner the sounds earlier during MAPS were amazing

speakerdamage · 2020-07-03T01:57:29.099Z

anyone else having trouble with the crow zip on osx? it’s showing as xxxx.bin.zip and saying it’s an unsupported format when I try to expand (I’ve tried a few other programs, no dice).

went to git to download the wtwo branch zip and ran into issues there as well (crow.bin was missing).

kasselvania · 2020-07-03T02:05:17.176Z

Yeah, seems as if its been taken down for some reason.

renegog · 2020-07-03T02:38:38.405Z

Deliriously excited about this—so happy to have what I thought was a busted w/ brought into a second life. Here’s a couple notes from my first sesh with it

In synth mode:

I was using a gate to trigger the LPG. If I pulled out the cable sending the gate signal when the gate was high the LPG would remain open. (If I pulled it out when it was low it would remain low as expected). With the LPG open and the synth droning, if I would plug the gate signal back in it would remain droning a bit longer even as gates are firing, although I could hear a bit of the LPG happening in the background. After a few triggers it would return to normal function. Not the biggest problem, but I assume it’s a bug since that’s not how the LPG metaphor would work.
Does it “learn” v/8 sequences somehow…? if i take the sequence out it keeps playing some note changes…

In delay mode:

I was getting some squeaky noisiness when the delay was active/unfrozen which would go away when I would freeze the buffer. Hard to tell over twitch, but it seemed like maybe you were experiencing some of this in the twitch stream Trent? Maybe some sort of aliasing? I didn’t experiment with different inputs, was just using a Mangrove through a DPLPG, nothing too loud or unusual.
The “freeze” control is a bit unclear to me: is it a toggle “on/off” or is it fading between a frozen buffer and an active buffer? It sort of seemed like that was what was happening but I couldn’t figure out how that would work in my head…
Was not able to get “loop + record” to toggle zooming. I was able to successfully CV control zoom, but whenever I touched “loop + record” whichever button I touched first would toggle between it’s two LEDs indicating its individual parameter options.

Really looking forward to checking out tape mode—it’s the one I’m most skeptical about because I love og w/ so much. Keeping one w/ in trad firmware for the time being Definitely cues can be a bit of a bear, although I liked that the difficulty and frustration of it reminded me of working with tape

EDIT: okay i was wrong, this update is great for tape mode too loool

PS I have a Teletype, don’t have either w/ hooked up to ii at the moment, but happy to change that if there ends up being teletype stuff to test!

mlogger · 2020-07-03T07:00:53.538Z

This looks great - will definitely update and report back

ps - the crow wiki link at the top post is not working

Here’s a couple of videos I put up on Instagram of the FM synth. It’s a joy with Cold Mac and Just Friends

Mannequins W/ (with) Equipment

Heres the fm op I am hand controlling pitch via a Cold Mac to the W/ THIS jack. Triggers from Just Friends V8 are going to the W/ THAT jack

GoneCaving · 2020-07-03T07:59:02.176Z

I only caught the first hour of the demo last night, but this look great. The change in the tape mode looks a little more intuitive, and far more immediate. The other modes sound interesting.

I do hope we get the new i2c commands on Teletype. Trents comments about the int size on TT versus Crow with respect to the timestamp command (large tape length will need large int) sounds like its worth discussion. Hopefully we can find some sort of workaround. What would be the addressable length of tape if we keep the same op, and the smaller int size?

toomanatees · 2020-07-03T14:25:03.963Z

Woah, this is way more than I was expecting. I love that you can change modes during runtime. W/synth and w/delay work as expected and sound great. I’m stumbling through using w/ tape mode at this point. Not totally sure what I did, but I hit a point where tapping the record button isn’t engaging record*. And looking at the this/that assignments under ‘record’ I only have the option of a ‘yellow+white’ functionality.

*edit: so it appears that record gain in adjustment affects the white record LED level. If your record gain is all the way down its not going to record anything, so I guess that makes sense.

Galapagoose:

loop + record. zoom

In w/delay I think this is actually play+record.

baleen · 2020-07-03T19:46:17.754Z

is there a way to clear the entire tape in w/tape mode? (in the previous firmware this was holding down+rec on boot)

capleniz · 2020-07-03T19:57:55.309Z

This is so cool. I’ve only tried w/syn for now and it’s way more immediate than I thought. The parameter assignment on patch cable insertion is extremely clever.

I was wondering if there’s some info missing on what the IN jack can take as far as parameters. I tried it out, some of it seems to be external FM, there was also another one that looked like it was similar to envelope gate. I didn’t invetigate too deeply though.

Will continue playing with it during the weekend. Thanks a ton @Galapagoose!

Galapagoose · 2020-07-03T20:07:12.319Z

toomanatees:

In w/delay I think this is actually play+record.

Correct, i updated the wiki.

renegog:

if i take the sequence out it keeps playing some note changes

This is probably because it takes 4 triggers to set all the voices back to the root note. Polyphony is pretty weird when the inputs are monophonic. The LPG bit you mentioned is probably the same issue - overlapping note tails with weird envelope shapes.

renegog:

If I pulled out the cable sending the gate signal when the gate was high the LPG would remain open.

This is a bug and will be fixed. Basically when removing a CV jack it’s freezing on the last value it received which I will change to ‘pretend it’s 0V’.

renegog:

squeaky noisiness

I noticed these in the stream too. Something to do with tape speed manipulation that i’ll have to track down.

renegog:

The “freeze” control

It’s an on/off right now. I mentioned in the stream that it could be implemented as a continuous fade (that’s essentially what record CV is doing in W/Tape).

GoneCaving:

I do hope we get the new i2c commands on Teletype

There’s nothing stopping this at all! Just a small design challenge. Personally I don’t particularly want to work on the TT firmware again, but I’m happy to compensate someone if they have the time & skills to add support.

toomanatees:

I only have the option of a ‘yellow+white’ functionality.

I’ve updated the wiki above to reflect this (it was a proposed feature listed before).

return_from_zero:

defaults to “tape running”

Yes this should not be the default - I just had it running that way because it made my testing easier. All 3 modes need to have default settings chosen.

return_from_zero:

I continue to struggle to apprehend where I am on a tape

Indeed this is the primary challenge within the chosen UI. One other thing I failed to mention is the tape is now a giant loop, so there is no ‘start’ or ‘end’.

Perhaps some kind of ‘look at the spools’ display could be implemented. This won’t happen until a later update.

baleen:

clear the entire tape in w/tape mode?

Not currently. I’ll consider adding that (or something similar) later. That feature was originally added because folks were ending up with glitchy noise on the tape due to SD card issues, so I’m less in rush to add it.

capleniz:

what the IN jack can take as far as parameters

In W/Syn it does 3 params (i’ll clarify above):

Ramp
Curve
Envelope trigger

This means you can do audiorate modualtion of the waveshaping params (similar to JF), and the trigger just means you can free up THIS or THAT for a different parameter instead of needing one for Gate.

baleen · 2020-07-03T20:10:42.268Z

Galapagoose:

Not currently. I’ll consider adding that (or something similar) later. That feature was originally added because folks were ending up with glitchy noise on the tape due to SD card issues, so I’m less in rush to add it.

erasing the tape is a feature i used every time I booted my synth.

everyone seems real happy here but now I have to learn a module from scratch, that doesn’t have features I want (being able to CV through cues was a selling point), or go back to a firmware that killed an SD card on me days before a gig. I don’t have Crow or Teletype and am not interested in i2c.

GoneCaving · 2020-07-03T20:18:40.242Z

Galapagoose:

There’s nothing stopping this at all! Just a small design challenge. Personally I don’t particularly want to work on the TT firmware again, but I’m happy to compensate someone if they have the time & skills to add support.

I’m happy to have a stab at this, but won’t have much time in the next week or two. If others are going to work on it, let me know. Quite happy to collaborate or let others do the work if they’ll have time to do it sooner.

renegog · 2020-07-03T20:32:47.689Z

This is just based on my first impression of beta firmware, but tape mode and delay mode do things that traditional w/ did, with much more manual control over settings (a bit menu divey, but seems like a fairly consistent use of the interface such that it doesn’t seem like it will be a huge pain to learn—probably might be a huge pain for people starting from scratch with w/ but as a user of w/ before it doesn’t seem too bad). i2c adds a lot of additional control but doesn’t seem necessary for either of these modes. the synth mode seems a bit limited outside of i2c control—I’ve been having fun with it but you can’t really access polyphony without i2c so I’m thinking of it more as a little bonus for the time being.

I also was one to erase tapes before most sessions, but there’s other ways to deal with it—now you can variably control the level of playback from the tape. It is a bit more like a tape machine without that option to clear the whole thing… My instinct at first was a bit like “why doesn’t it just do what it did better instead of all this feature creep?” but it seems like it really does do what it did, better. (although the synth is straight up feature creep, but it’s so fun lmao).

For looping without relying on SD card at all, try delay mode depends how you were using W/ before but that mode has a lot of flexibility to do a lot of what I was using it for and you don’t have to worry about SD card failures (it uses RAM) and you don’t have to worry about clearing the memory before use

scanner_darkly · 2020-07-03T20:34:51.098Z

in the meantime you can use the generic i2c ops from the beta from 3.2+ thread

Jonny · 2020-07-03T20:50:32.871Z

I would also like tape erasure without reboot, especially for live scenarios.

Will the cv output options remain and what does the teletype support look like? Maybe I should go back and read again.

baleen · 2020-07-03T21:01:23.335Z

you identify the issues I have with this beta.

•menu divey. I actually have less idea of what I’m doing now. I’m genuinely unsure how to work the loop mode. I do not feel less lost in the tape (the original manual seemed to encourage getting lost in the tape!), I feel more lost in the controls. the orig manual emphasized things like “muscle memory” and I have that for the orig firmware. I find it really easy to use, and the 1.21 update added just enough customization that W/ was really useable and novel.

•I don’t want other ways to deal with a full buffer when I start up, (setting the rec head to full overwrite, then manually pulling it back to where I want it?). I want to start with a clean slate. Typically, I record minutes of material in, add a few cue points to hop around (or simply trim) and when it’s time to move on, loop+up(+up) and i’m on to a clean chunk of tape.

I don’t need to be helped to adopt new features. I want a stable module with the features I came for.

renegog · 2020-07-03T21:36:32.338Z

I can’t disagree with you there, I loved the module as it was and this pretty much has to be considered a new module. I plan to keep one w/ in the old firmware while one switches to this new firmware (obviously not proposing this as a solution, it’s a luxury to have two and one still functioning on old firmware). Very difficult to do what you were doing without cues or i2c control. I hope we can get tape clearance.

I don’t mean to seem like I’m trying to help you adopt new features, have no interest in convincing you or whatever just trying to be helpful if I can! Were “cue’s” and “digital tape clearing” on the list of features you came for and not ones you discovered on w/? Because even in beta this seems much more stable than my busted w/ was before (even when it was working, the other one is just fine—apparently to do with SD card degradation). Speaking for myself, it’s a different module that does similar but slightly different things that might require slight adjustments to fit back into my workflow. But, there’s stuff I’ve been able to do with it in tape mode just in the past day that I was not able to do with the traditional w/. More possibilities is not always better, but in this case the tape mode is in many ways a simplified version. I do miss “marking” the “tape” with that cute little switch tho.

@return_from_zero I think the point is that it’s a long tape loop.

renegog · 2020-07-03T21:43:06.092Z

Ha, that’s a great image if you imagine an irl tapeloop!

My point being that this effects the use case. If you have i2c control, you can pinpoint a ms specific spot on the tape where your goods are recorded. If you don’t, then live sampling or otherwise might be the way to go.

Starthief · 2020-07-03T21:57:33.256Z

To me the original cue system was confusing, and the CV control could be frustrating. With some regret, I sold my W/ during the first few weeks, though I loved the sound when it worked.

This update seems super promising to me, especially with TT integration, and the changes that seem designed to address stability (even if it’s a big rewrite) and SD card issues.

I’d have dropped everything and bought one immediately when I saw the thread, if I didn’t have a SynthTech E520 on the way that I need to evaluate before I work out how anything else fits into my FX ecosystem. From what I see in this thread I expect I’d rather work with W/2 than a software looper like I have been.