At 12:00 AM 1/27/2006 -0500, Geoff wrote:
>Anyway, I THINK that I would much rather see the 650 ship ASAP without
>this feature than face a potentially business-damaging delay as a new
>feature was implimented, debugged, tested, fixed, tested again, etc
>etc.
No worries there. Paul wants to begin shipping the 650 ASAP too, so you're not going to see it held up by feature bloat. :) The 650 was designed from Day 1 to be flash upgradeable via MIDI, so it won't be a problem to add features in the future.
>I don't know what the current code footprint is vs. the amount of
>storage on the 650, but I'd hope that paul could add these sorts of
>things later on.
Yes, there's room to grow. At some time in the future, Synthcom will be offering a low cost firmware upgrade for the 650. Most of the new features are for the arpeggiators. The 650 firmware is based on code we wrote for our Europa upgrade for the Jupiter 6, so a lot of the features are already written, were debugged years ago, and are currently being used by hundreds of musicians. For an idea of what some of the additional arpeggiator features will be (as well as a description of the voice assign modes), see:
http://synthcom.com/Europa/support/EuropaUserGuideV1.0.pdf I wrote the arpeggiator code, and I'd LOVE to add to the feature set. I was already thinking about adding a Brownian motion / random walk feature. If you've got other ideas, I'd love to hear them.
>Software with a real interface for this stuff is one thing.
>Fitting it into a module is another.
At least we have an LCD to work with. :) Since all the features can be controlled via midi CCs, if you want a dedicated button for each feature, you could build one using the MidiBox hardware platform. (cutting square holes to match the 650's buttons could be a bitch, though ;)
>The best arpeggiator I used was certainly
>ARP-X8 (software) which was nearly as smart/powerful as the KARMA system
>in the korg products, but it was a ton more accessible.
I'd love to see the user manual for the ARP-X8.
Jeffrey