#21

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?

2 Likes
#22

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.

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

2 Likes
#23

It appears when switching into W/Tape mode that it defaults to “tape running” as soon as the mode is engaged. This also appears to be the case when the synth is powercycled in W/Tape mode.

In a performance setting, this could pose a problem if the tape is accidentally left running when what the user wanted to do was cue up a specific section for playback. Likewise in the studio, powering on your synth and wandering off to get a cup of coffee could leave you unclear on where you are on the tape.

Ultimately this is compounded by the fact that I continue to struggle to apprehend where I am on a tape (particularly in relation to its start or end, but also in relation to the bits of music on it.) If I had an eight-hour cassette I could pop it out of the deck and look at how much tape was on one spool versus another spool. With the current beta, I can’t even seem to “find” the start of the tape. When rewinding, the reverse playback light blinks endlessly. Is it just that I’ve left my synth on at some point in W/Tape mode (since it defaults to “playing”)? What are the ways the lights could be used to tell me where I am on the tape? It might be good to be able to snap back to the start of the tape somehow since this is likely where most of the material will live on an 8-hour tape.

Amazing update. I feel like I’ve just gotten way more value than I originally paid for, which is a really good feeling. I’m scanning the room looking for something I can sell so I can get a second one. :grin:

5 Likes
#24

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

#25

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!

#26

Correct, i updated the wiki.

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.

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’.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

8 Likes
#27

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.

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#28

Do agree that being able to clear the tape is a pretty important feature to include.

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#29

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.

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#30

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 :slight_smile: 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 :wink:

5 Likes
#31

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

2 Likes
#32

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. :upside_down_face:

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#33

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.

5 Likes
#34

I think all it would take would be an immutable “start point” and the ability to snap back to it. “Inspecting” the playhead’s position relative to the spools is far less important (and yea I think that would be difficult to implement).

As an analogy, I spent half a day last week going through a shoebox of cassettes I recorded in the late 90s. The number of cassettes with material running the length of the first side was maybe 30%, with material on the second side was maybe 10%.

The impulse to crack the cellophane on a fresh C90 was strong, it seems. Even though I could visually inspect the spools, it would still not be an indicator of where the material was or how much. Rewinding the tape to the start of side A would be therefore the most likely way to find any material.

2 Likes
#35

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.

1 Like
#36

Right, a tape loop so long that accidentally having left it playing could leave you hopelessly lost and frantically rewinding at “slightly faster than playback” speed ten minutes before going on stage…

2 Likes
#37

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.

#38

I didn’t really like the “down to mark” then “up to mark and loop” or whatever because the behaviour of the toggle switch was so different when the tape was stopped and when the tape was running.

With an actual tape deck, hitting rewind just slams the thing into reverse, regardless of whether the thing was playing or stopped, so the new firmware seems more like an actual tape machine in this respect.

I used to find myself accidentally setting a bunch of meaningless cue points (that were tough to interact with) when all I wanted to do was rewind or fastforward…

Edit: I’m sure you could have an immutable start pointer and also address position over i2c, it shouldn’t be either or, no?

#39

Yeah, I’m optimistic that much of this will all be ironed out, but I was definitely hoping the update would just resolve the instability of the SD card and be left alone otherwise. My fear is that all these changes will mean the W/ is buggy for another stretch. That’s exactly why I didn’t pounce on the W/ for a year or two upon release.

I’m open to some change though. The idea of the synth is a bit absurd, because it is a simulated reel to reel, so I’ll never access that mode and it seems totally counter to what the module was supposed to be, but I don’t find the idea of splitting the W/ into the other two modes disagreeable. Building that muscle memory for a new approach is also ok with me.

Just to be clear, I love Whimsical stuff and bought everything else immediately upon pre-order if I recall, EXCEPT for W/ because of the bug concerns and ergonomic concerns. I have two now and have come around to some degree, but stability is just the most important thing for me. I perform live and can’t rely on stuff that breaks down. It’s a different mindset I guess than some folks have who can accommodate for that ‘quirk’.

I’m hopeful, but just like my hesitation to buy the thing in the first place, I’ll likely wait awhile while these things are smoothed out. Fingers crossed.

5 Likes
#40

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.