So after reading a few threads around here I’ve come to understand that the main developer of the OT is not longer at Elektronauts and therefore I assume major overhauls of and added features to the Octatrack are very slim. Maybe I’m just being a pessimist but seeing how after Elektron has retired the Machinedrum and Monomachine, the Octatrack is the oldest machine in their current support and definitely isn’t on their “to-do” list so to speak. This makes me assume they’re going to drop it in the near future and any hope of a major update quite slim.
So if this is the case, why not make the Octa open source? Seeing the passion of the OT community in finding work-arounds and alternate fixes makes me think if it were able to develop a custom OS (a la JJOS), I think the OT, which is an already quite notorious sampler, could achieve absolute legendary status.
This would give the community an opportunity to fix the things it thinks need fixing, and relieve Elektron to continue onward bringing their newest ideas to fruition.
I really don’t want Elektron to abandon the Octatrack. But if that’s inevitable, this might be a good solution.
But they are constantly brainstorming on a successor to the OT, rather than listening to the community and integrating things that would make perfect sense on it and that are requested for ages already? is that what you wanted to say?
Simon, while this is very re-assuring, it begs the question if the Octatrack devs still work on the OT?
Take the Pickup machines, for example: since their release in summer 2012 with, just 3 bug fixes (according to the release notes) were made directly to pickup usage (2 of them concerning their control via MIDI, one reg. Pickup monitoring).
No progress yet on these pickup issues:
• Pickup machines can’t be overdubbed if the OT is synced to an external clock
• Pickup machines can’t be overdubbed if their loop lengths are unrelated (=other than x2, x4 and x8 relationships)
• Pickup machines can’t be reliably prevented from changing the project tempo (only if you limit the 1st pickup recording to a preset loop length of 64 steps max)
• The slave icon doesn’t vanish on Pickup machines (see separate thread in this forum)
• The FIN and FOUT fades are not implemented as specified (see diagram below)
Aside from these pickup machine issues, there are these long-standing bugs:
• Cueing doesn’t work correctly in Studio mode.
• If a Thru machine set to A+B receives a MIDI note, it collapses from stereo to mono.
• Clearing a recording in Flex or Pickup machines sets QPL parameter to “off”
And, as I am sure everybody here has his own “pet” OT bug, I can’t help but to share mine: • I so dearly wish the OT adopted the pattern copy behavior of the A4 and the AR: In both instruments, I can copy a pattern to a destination pattern WITHOUT having to leave the pattern I want to copy. This is so essential for live improvisation! In case of the OT, it has to first PLAY the destination pattern before I am allowed to perform the copy operation, which means that I (and the audience) either hear silence (because the destination pattern is empty), or nonsense (because the destination pattern is not empty and contains some unrelated stuff).
I know I should not bite the hand that feeds, but as most of these issues have been reported to Elektron support years ago, not seeing any progress made me rant, sorry for this.
The diagram is correct and is how the OT behaves. It can not predict the future so a fade out will happen when you stop the recording not before you stop it.
The fade in and out are not applied in post processing but in real-time.
There is one error in your diagram and is that you draw that the start of the fade in not from the beginning. This is not true since then all sampled material would have been out of sync.
I thought fades in/out were working on Pickups. It works for me as a crossfade, good for layering pads. Have to be master.
You can overdub with Ot as slave with Flex Machines and Cue settings but as far as I know you can’t crossfades overdubs, maybe with 2 tracks…
So mixing fades with Flex would be a good option too.
my most wanted feature at this point is just getting up to parity with the “conditional trigs” now available on the new Analog units… they are so so awesome
I feel an itch to address this further since this topic has been sprouting a lot lately.
What does open source really mean?
Any project could be open source, but what makes open source actually work is that the source code is made with being open in mind.
What does this mean in practice?
A closed source most likely does not contain as much helpful information, well-commented sections, tidy structures etc. Things one would expect from an open source project that a community could viably make use of.
Open source only works if the code is made to be understandable by a third party. If the Octatrack source would be released tomorrow, you would need to spend a ridiculous amount of time figuring it out.
Note that I am now solely writing about open vs. closed and what that means in a practical sense. There is also the aspect of intellectual property. There are implementations that the creators want to keep to themselves for various reasons.
Regarding JJOS - it is an anomaly. JJ did not reverse engineer the code - he had access to the source and was working at Akai during the development of the MPC1000. Hence, it was possible for him to make JJOS. This is not something one could do without having a) Source code b) Project knowledge c) Tools
These are [some of the] reasons why Elektron source code will not be made open source.
Will there be major feature additions to the Octatrack at this point (5 years since release)
Simon - thanks for speaking up with that point of view. I will add - even though “everyone” wants code to be open source so that “we all” can fix bugs and add much desired features, my question is - how many of these people have actually downloaded an open source project for music equipment and tried to do anything with it?
I have and it’s non-trivial.
2 projects come to mind (both developed from the beginning as open source) - the GenoQs Octopus hardware sequencer and the Roger Linn Linnstrument. I’ve built the GenoQs code and did some minor tweaks when I owned one and I have customized my Linnstrument with functionality that Roger and Geert considered to be bugs or unintended features as well as a couple other UI tweaks.
I have the benefit of being a software developer in the real world for 30 years and have worked on everything from mainframes to embedded systems to web UIs. Even with all that background, doing something non-trivial like adding a new feature is extremely time consuming and intense to work on, and that’s with code designed to be shared from the beginning.
Folks severely underestimate the skill and time required to fix bugs and add features to code that you didn’t personally develop.