#166

I use overwrite mode with cv control but basics function should be a lot easier to manage.

#167

I sat down today to try to run tape mode through its paces. Obviously there are some known issues but at least one of these I haven’t seen mentioned:

  • The tape is much shorter than 8 hours - it’s just a few minutes. This might just be my unit.
  • Recording is flaky. It only seems to work at normal speed or lower. Double speed seems to utterly ignore the input signal with no indication that it isn’t recording. If you switch from normal speed to double speed, recording will stop and you won’t be able to record anymore even if you switch back to normal speed. I think you have to stop recording and playback and may even have to re-set the loop points.
  • Recordings made at lower speeds are sometimes silent at normal or double speed, which can be problematic when trying to find some blank tape to record on. This can be odd when changing speed within a loop, as some chunks of the look are audible and others are silent. Almost seems like an off-by-one interpolation issue?
  • There is always glitching when recording. I only tried this when monitoring, so I’m not sure if this is a monitoring issue or if I’m hearing the “read head”.
  • Not only does playback start when powered on (which as pointed out in post 23 is problematic), it starts out at an arbitrary spot. Saving settings for tape mode doesn’t seem to have an effect.
  • As posts 80 and 84 mentioned, the play + up/down shortcut is inconsistent. I didn’t perceive this as having to hit them multiple times but rather having to press them quickly for it to work (I could be wrong though)
  • CV pitch control is stepped/quantized (may be intentional but I’d personally prefer unquantized)
  • CV pitch control glitches (“scraping”) in additive mode until it goes silent in the middle of the loop, sounds like a buffer underrun
3 Likes
#168

The tape appears to be 4 min 21 sec 975 ms long at normal speed.

1 Like
#169

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! It’s been a great help for understanding where things are at. At this point I’d ask folks just to be patient for the next beta. I’ve fixed / improved a lot of things already, but want some more time testing W/Tape before posting a new beta.

I’ll leave the firmware download for the curious.

28 Likes
#170

Will there be any drastic changes to i2c? I ask to know if I should finish the teletype-w/2.0 i2c or it is better wait for new beta?

1 Like
#171

Drastic changes, probably not. Perhaps some additions or name changes, or we might reconsider the Timestamp / Seek commands.

Having working TT support pre-2.0 would be really great. Now is a great time to be testing the API!

4 Likes
#172

Is there a way to know on which mode w/2 is set on in crow?

#173

Have you tried turning down the recording gain and the monitor gain? I believe I was experiencing this and I came to the conclusion that it was basically clipping/gain staging.

#174

I played with the gain quite a bit. On playback, gain wasn’t an issue at all, even when overdubbing (no clipping). So I don’t think that was it. The glitching didn’t sound like clipping - what it sounded like to me is when you drag a CD a little bit on an old (80s/early 90s) player without skip protection, so that the laser starts reading the bits at slightly the wrong speed and the adjacent samples get mixed up.

#175

I picked up a new W/ this week & decided to install the new 2.0 firmware as it looked significantly easier to interact with - here are some observations using the ‘Tape’ mode (the sketch book idea with hours available with ability to overdub is the reason for buying):

  • The length of my ‘tape’ is approximately 4 mins & 20 seconds (+/- 2 seconds) … certainly not 8 hours
  • I have struggled to get it to record…
  • 1st attempt: I thought you had to press ‘Record’ to start recording & press again to stop. I did this and it didn’t record anything?! (Scrubbing backwards I just heard silince).
  • 2nd attempt: I then tried pressing ‘play’ first & then ‘record’ followed by a 2nd ‘record’ to stop recording - that didn’t work either. (Scrubbing backwards I just heard silince).
  • 3rd attempt: I then tried the same procedure as attempt 2 but after pressing the first ‘record’ I then pressed ‘loop’ and then ‘loop’ & ‘record’ to start it looping & stop recording. I didn’t get any sound out of it again until I then switched the looping off (held down ‘loop’) and then I heard that I actually managed to record something (and found the tape was only 4m 20s long) … so I was fairly happy to be able to at least record something but it definitely doesn’t seem to work as the instructions at the top suggest).
  • Trying to scrub through only 4 mins 20 sec of audio was painful, I can’t imagine how this would work if I had 8 hours of tape to move through.

Looking forward to the next firmware update - my two main concerns are that the tape length is tiny & recording is not very easy to achieve.

1 Like
#176

Here’s my observations on tape mode and the way I record a loop in v2.

I believe the 8 hours of material was removed in this beta because cue points were removed. If you want a sketchbook with hours of info - You may want to go back to v1 and try that version. 1 of my w/ is still on v1 for that reason, but obviously you will lose the other 2 modes from v2 and crow support. With cue modes in V1 the idea is to jump to different parts of the tape not scrub through hours of material.

1 Like
#177

I am checking this out now, currently playing with W/Del.

I am getting A LOT of noise, enough to effect a mix.

Apart from that I am loving the character of the delay.

#178

Finally updated one of my w/s and have only experimented with delay mode so far. Such a brilliant use of this cute lil interface, Trent! I’ve been kind of shocked by how intuitive it’s been to switch between parameters, and the clever idea to use the toggle switch as a ‘knob’ for each parameter works sooo well. I don’t find it menu-divey at all. I’ve been on the fence about keeping my Mimeophon and feel like once the kinks are smoothed out, and especially once the lowpass parameter is implemented, I’ll probably have all the delay I need in w/ : )

A couple observations:

  • Definitely echo some others’ feelings that a way to get back to zero modulation / turning the ‘knob’ back to the center, so to speak, would be great (maybe something like holding down the button associated with the parameter in question and flicking the toggle up??) I could see this feature being especially useful for the modulation setting, where it’s hard for me to turn the modulation off once I play around with it. Would also help for the time setting, where a simple gesture could bring the time back to x1.

  • I’ve gotten some clicky glitchy noise, I think mostly when modulation amount is changed even a little bit. Also a lot of squeaky noise when ‘time’ is changed

  • When setting a tap tempo, it works correctly the first time I set it in a session, and if I reset the tempo to a faster rate, that works too! But when I try to reset the tempo to a slower tempo than it currently is, it weirdly doesn’t register at all. My easy solution is to just hold the toggle down to clear the current tempo settings and reset the tempo.

  • The zoom feature is super cool! But sometimes it doesn’t really seem to multiply or divide correctly and just gives me seemingly random tempos that are super aliased-sounding, sometimes giving off a super high-pitched tone!

Anyway, I’m sure most of this is stuff that’s already been said above, but as someone who benefits so much from the work that you and others around here do, I just wanted to contribute in a teeny way and give my own thoughts here. thank you !!

8 Likes
#179

Is the synth mode working with Teletype? :slight_smile:

#180

It is slowly being added here:


Basically all the i2c commands should be possible to call for all 3 W/ modes, but retrieving values from W/ is still missing (so for example you can’t check on teletype the current value for fm ratio etc.)

4 Likes
#181

Yes, it’s working for me

5 Likes
#182

Hello there! I’ve just bought my W due to this exciting update, very overwhelmed to integrate it with the i2c ecosystem. Sorry for the newbie question, but:
Can someone tell me what is the command to open the fm Synth in Druid? I’ve just researched in thread but no results :sweat_smile:
Thank you

#183

In general you can enter ii.help() to show you the names of the possible devices. Enter ii.wsyn.help() to get the commands specific to WSyn. Good luck!

1 Like
#184

Not with my w/, but I think you need to enter w/synth from the w/ panel controls. i.e. hold rec + play + loop etc…

3 Likes
#185

Thank you all: I would try to dig in W/synth with ii commands because I didn’t have good chances to play it with cv commands…but maybe it’s a fault of mine!
Now I’m trying again to play it by First running in Crow (by cvs of course), keep you posted.
Tape mode and Delay sooooper cool!