It has been said that they have pushed the current hardware as far as it would go (hence no OB or USB audio, memory limits, etc.)
So if they want to add those features, they would have to start over, with new hardware.
My feeling is there won’t be a Octatrack v2.
Rather a completely new product, that hopefully has many/most of the features (or similar) that people love about the OT, with a few new surprises.
The OT is already as complex as the market can handle, and their recent drive has been towards friendlier UX rather than ‘more features’.
So if there’s a sequel, it won’t be stuffing more functions in — it’ll be removing some, making it more elegant, and adding OB. There will be no comb filter and no pickup machines. None of the OT weirdness. But the machine will look great.
It will be a sad day, but life will go on.
Of course they’ll keep the comb filters and the pickup machines since people are using those. OT is meant to be used in many different ways and in complex setups so I don’t follow what you are saying there. More elegant and easier to use - sure.
The OT is mostly complex bacuase of the absolutely insane interface and menu structure. I bet you could condense 90% of the functionality into something that’s actually easy to use without too much effort. I had to draw out a huge schematic of the functionality for myself when I got it, so I could use it as a map for when I got lost. I’ve literally never had to do that for any other piece of gear, or even super complex software packages that have a shit ton more features and complexity than the OT. I feel like the shitty UX design of the OT has granted it some kind of legendary status for being this insurmountable behemoth, when actually it’s just confusing for the sake of it.
Lately I’ve been daydreaming about an OT with a 4x4 grid of velocity sensitive pads instead of the current row of 16 trig buttons, and a new polyphonic machine, and a few more trig modes in addition to the current ones. What I want is not an AR, tho, I want an OT with high quality pads and some level of polyphony,
Minimum requirements.
Proposing something Elektron would sell easily to fanboys.
A mixer has been asked oftenly and seem interesting to complement the line. Personally, I already have too much gear, but I guess I’m a fanboy (black, OT / Digis form factor only )
I’m not sure it would be possible to keep the functionality and streamline the UX a great deal without going the touchscreen route, which I’m sure most of us OT fans have deliberately avoided.
Yeah the screen is absolutely the limiting factor for the OT, but I don’t think it’d need a touchscreen; just a slightly larger screen or a UI that at least displays some info about the current state and hierarchical relationships such as bank, part etc.
that’s a really good point I hadn’t thought of before.
a richer higher res screen that, besides what you are immediately working on as the current screen shows, gives you a better surrounding picture of your project set up would be great.
particularly if you can use a new knob to navigate to a screen area and click in order to address changes etc.
Yeah, I think half the people who say they haven’t figured out how parts work would be totally fine if the interface just displayed the current part, its parent bank, and parts autosaved with the project. As it is they seem to be organised totally independently of one another and there’s literally nothing in the interface that represents the relationship. It’s designed like a puzzle.
Macros load and save for the various parts of the OT (e.g. for scene assignments) would be incredibly useful and make it much easier to use. So for instance I use almost the same settings and scenes for the tracks that I use for running the DN into OT and I want to be able to save those tracks including scene assignments and be able to load those in any project.
Also it could have templates for the many different ways of using it but being able to load tracks with macros might just be the way, I think.