Open Letter To Elektron

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#41

Agreed.

Did neilbaldwin ask Elektron?[/quote]
my point exactly - plus when it’s done collectively and illustrates a real issue it’ll be more likely to solicit a response - i can predict the response to a solitary user’s conceptual query, but there’s often been some good insight coming out of gothenberg voluntarily so you never know, but here’s not the place[/quote]
If I had and had received a response I’d just paste it straight into this thread. This way I’m cutting out the middle man. Or giving Elektron the chance to do that.
Once again, I respect your idea avantronica but unless there’s some kind of sign from Elektron that they’re remotely interested in hearing curated feedback like that, what’s the point? We’d just be wasting a whole lot of time and effort.

#42

i think we all sorta feel your pain Neil, but the only thing we know we’re encouraged to do is contact support about issues; everything we users ponder here is just speculative and informal afaik
.
my suggested approach (to shaping the roadmap) isn’t something that guarantees results either, i just think it is more likely to on two counts

  1. it’s direct - it gets read & gets a response
  2. it’s compelling because there’s evidence of an issue and a consensus from a broad spectrum of committed solutions-focussed users
    .
    I also agree it could be a waste of time - but at least a constructive thread discussing issue X could then be linked to when a new user asks the same old questions/FR time after time - as it stands there’s a lot of frustration, but I don’t see much grounds for that frustration as merely voicing those frustrations here is futile imho - this is an informal chat platform and imho it’s rendered impossible for Elektron to meaningfully join in periodically as it descends into comical territory all too often - it is probably best served exactly the way it is, so that leaves support for the more searching enquiries that the elektronauts can’t answer, like this one
    .
    leaving aside all our issues and questions of roadmaps, I’m not sure we are entitled to feel neglected because questions/requests/bug-reports on here go unaddressed - this is one of the usual justifications for retrospective bitching, I just think that’s wasted energy
    .
    not trying to pop anyone’s bubble here, we’d all love to know :slight_smile:

if nothing else this is a free bump to aid your slim chances :wink:

#43

There is a well established and successful “community solution” for curated feedback that Elektron could use if they were interested - it’s used by many hi-tech, software and device manufacturers - here’s a couple of simple examples:

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Requests/idb-p/features

http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client-Ideas/idb-p/Windows_Ideas/tab/most-kudoed

These type of dedicated feedback widgets are successful because they provide many of the things a Product development team needs to efficiently track user requests in a way that is transparent to the community.

Crucially, the success of this type of approach is largely based on its transparency - end users can see how “popular” their request is based on community votes and comments - the Product team can reject or stall even hugely popular requests via the “status” field with reasoned responses.

Typically, the implementation rate (requests that make product) for these initiatives is between 1-10% - so it’s not a huge undertaking in terms of development resource - most ideas are on balance unpopular or unfeasible - and the best ones that bubble to the top, give the business a clear view of what a broad base of users really want.

Unfortunately, while a widget like this is cheap and easy to add to a forum, it requires the business to embrace the notion of greater transparency and recognise the business value of “co creation” with its best users. It seems Elektron are quite conservative in this regard - they are an innovative 21st Century company that are stuck with grey 20th Century business philosophy.

#44

Some of us have sent bug reports/contacted Elektron directly and even received a response. It would be useful to start by identifying the long-standing issues and whether anyone has directly contacted Elektron/reported it as a bug, and what the response has been.

For example - when I contacted them about Pickup machines dropping out of overdub when externally clocked, they did respond. The summary was “we couldn’t keep the pitch/timestretch/etc funtionality solid because the external clock is too unstable”.

What that told me was that there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t do it; it was more a matter of they didn’t like the behavior they observed. In this case, if it wasn’t too difficult, they could theoretically add a global option to allow/disallow it and let the user live with the consequences.

In addition, given all their recent work with Overbridge, maybe they can incorporate a smoothing algorithm on the MIDI input buffer to help make it more stable.

Given the number of years since the OT was released and the existence of very stable clocking, the glitches/errors/weirdness may be non-evident, acceptable, or even embraced depending on what you’re going for at the time.

I can dig up the exact replies if we’re going to continue.

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