Storage and Samples
The 4 GB that pulsefrequenz is referring to here is only for the internal flash storage on the Q. This doesn’t include the sample storage available from SD card – i wrote pulsefrequenz and we share the same understanding about this.
So how much storage space is on the Q?
SD cards go to 1 Terabyte (1000 Gigabyte) now, Sandisk sells them for instance. The Q requires that the SD card be formatted to FAT, but my understanding is that Microsoft exFAT allows for very large storage capacities. I haven’t seen detail on the maximum capacity of SD Cards for the Q in Waldorf documentation, so i’m not sure what the maximum storage is. (Anybody know?)
Load time for the Q will be slower from an SD card than from SSD storage in the X, or should be with all other things being equal. I’d love to see benchmarking done to compare the two. The ability to replace one SD card’s set of samples with another would be useful for a lot of situations.
pulsefrequenz in his informative post supposes that the X has “multiple samples across the keyboard.” I am pretty sure this is correct, i think that is what Gerry Basserman of DSI said in the Sonic State video.
The Q has this too, both with the Particle Generator (which is both a granular synth and a sample synth) and the Resonator – they both can use multi-samples that are mapped over the keyboard. This is talked about in the manual.
I’d also love to hear the Q played with some 8Dio libraries just for comparison. With the Q they could be used in the Particle Generator (samples or granular) and the Resonator, and in the Wavetable oscillators – or all three simultaneously mixed together.
I’ve been thinking of the range of possibilities with the Q, or the X for that matter eventually, with choice from a variety of content. The X shows again the possibilities available with high quality production samples. The same goes for the Q – regardless how good the Waldorf patches currently under production will eventually be, what else is possible?
Not sure how the X and the Q compare with the controls for the sample playback part?
Here are the controls on the front panel for an oscillator on the Q. There are more oscillator controls that are mappable on the Q as well, and there are also touchscreen controls.
And these are the Sample controls on the X. (Apologies for the quality of the image.)
It would also be interesting to compare sound, side by side the analog filters on the Q and the X with the same sample content. That’s one way to see if the dual analog filters on the Q add anything.
Dual analog filters with some resonance, moving separately under variable LFO control!