Do we know what kind of cpu the bento is using?
Tradition and the sense of continuity, gotta value those. New fw 1.0.12 is available (āswing control, improved polyphony, bug fixesā) so maybe worth checking as well. Works the same, first you need to burn both bin folders onto your DVD then put the disc in the drive printed side of the DVD facing up etc. Have a nice weekend and tell us EVERYTHING later! 
Downloads - 1010music LLC
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So Iāve managed to get some samples onto it last evening. I only had around ten minutes to play with it and there were several things that stopped and confused me. Iām still looking forward to getting to play more with it - once I had a sample in the slicer, sliced it and played it in with the sequencer, I had a lot of fun and could see the potential over how DT handles these things.
Some things that really bothered me, I hope I just didnāt understand things and will be able to solve that once the manual is out or I dug some more:
- You donāt have an encoder thatās dedicated to volume. Meaning youāll have to jump to the track menu to adjust headphone output level.
- The metronome is ear piercingly loud and doesnāt change when lowering headphone output volume. I found an option to deactivate or change its volume on the launch screen though.
- Once youāve set what āmachineā is on a track, you canāt change it.
- I miss all of the copy/paste and save/delete/reload functions of my Elektrons
Also worth noting is that you canāt boot it without an SD card. So itās probably best if you donāt expect to choose between saving/loading things to/from an internal drive or SD card.
Edit: Iāve started to reconstruct a DT II project on it and am a lot more optimistic now. Loading my drum slices up and adjusting start/end points while seamlessly zooming into the WAV file is such a huge jump from DT II (and OT). Iām not a fan of bigger displays with higher resolutions, but this is the clear case where it just annihilates the DT. You donāt even need to use the slicer machine because itās so easy to set exact start and end points.
Playing in drums with the pads is amazing and I can easily set up choke groups for my hats so that it works like an AR with two button presses, huge win over DT.
Recording and launching loops with the pads is also straightforward and mostly fun. Having many options for recording exactly quantized loops is really useful. Iām a bit worried that it might lack more fine control over when exactly a loop will start to play after hitting the pad. I also really hope theyāll soon enable us to record loops into the sequencer or give us a fast way to load a recorded loop into a one shot or slicer track.
I still find a lot of things confusing, but am now more confident that a lot of it is just a matter of using it and building up muscle memory. I havenāt found out how to delete recordings or re-record loops onto a slots for example. Iām definitely missing a copy/delete function. The encoders donāt always line up with the screen text of parameters, so itās a bit hard to know which encoder to use, especially in menus that only have like 6 options.
The sound seems to be great, although thatās always a tricky thing to say about a sampler. All I can say is that I really like how the samples I loaded to the SD card as well as the ones I recorded sound. Canāt tell if thereās any normalizing or imprint of character going on yet.
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Big fail. Hopefully there is a kind of shortcut described in the non existing manual 
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Just wanna let you know that it is a lot of fun! I tried to reprogram a DT II project and ended up somewhere else. I think if you want to make Elektron sequencer style tracks, it will disappoint and frustrate. But it has other things to offer that are inspiring.
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How is it chopping up melodic samples in the DrumKit/Slicer. Does adjusting Attack/Zero Point resolve any sort of audio clicking when a sample starts?
Is there Zero Point detection?
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I canāt answer these questions straight but can tell you what I did. I only have experience with this stuff on DT (II) and OT and Iād say Bento eats their lunch when it comes to slicing. I canāt compare it to an MPC, Maschine etc. though.
I mostly used one shots with:
- One sample containing 8-16 one shots of drum hits
- Several bars long synth recordings where a lot is happening
- Several minutes long field recordings where a lot is happening
I found it very easy to define start and end points. You can just open the wav, zoom extremely close and scroll with the touch screen. That made it easy to find a spot without clicks. And if there were some, I added a bit of attack and it worked fine. No filter envelope though.
I only dabbled with the slice machine but it recognized my prepared drum one shots effortlessly, I think even without me telling it that it was 16 slices. You can tell it how many slices it has and it will then search for them automatically, most likely analyzing zero crossings. I think you could also adjust the start and end points of slices, which I didnāt need to do yet, as the one shot already works well and can contain 16 samples. I assume working with the touch screen, zooming and scrolling will be as great when adjusting slices as it is in the one shot machine. I have a strong feeling from what Iāve done that this is its strong suite.
If you work with long and busy samples, it should be well suited for that, but I can only guess that from the experience Iāve described. It was definitely a lot of fun using really long synth samples to pick spots and play around with them. Might also be nice in the granular mode.
The sequencer is really basic at this point though , if thatās important for you. Only four sequences per track are not that bad imo, because these can be up to 256 steps and a one shot track can contain 16 samples. Plus you also have 16 loops available in a loop track, can resample etc. But it doesnāt have plocks and no conditions, only probabilities. Itās also finicky to input or adjust trigs on the display, itās easy to delete stuff or add steps where you didnāt want them to be. And thereās no undo/reload function. No microtiming right now. Also not sure if you can do polyrhythms.
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Could you expand on that ?
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See what I wrote on that in this paragraph:
If you can live without plocks, conditions, microtiming and polyrhythms, it has an intuitive sequencer for you.
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The Elektron sequencer spoiled me with every other device Iāve tried!
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Letās see for myself. I always felt like you, but Iām interested in getting away from it a bit right now and see what else is out there 
. If you have no interest in that, this is not for you.
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Cool. Iām mostly interested in using it like a better and portable MPC and M+ instrument.
Maybe Iāll swing into Perfect Circuit today to see what happens. 
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Portable, yes. Better might depend strongly on what you want to do. Iām sure MPC and Maschine are a lot more fully featured in almost any way. I donāt know if 1010 did themselves a disservice by advertising this thing as a āworkstationā. So far it feels more like a small groovebox thatās more on the āfunā side, but can do surprisingly much if you look at it from that angle. Workstation will result in more āI canāt believe it only has four patternsā complaints.
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You are a very good reporter, like āBroadcasting live from the Bento coast, brought to you exclusively on ElektroNet South 94.5FMā 
Thanks!
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Haha, good to hear 
!
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Yeah i donāt think it can replace an MPC at this stage but thereās something nice about a portable sampler that i find compelling.
Iāve owned everything from a Circuit to an Octatrack and XY but have always been on the look out for a more complete sampler with proper Bus Mixing and per pad effects.
If the basics are right a lot can be done.
I canāt wait until you can sample into a Drumkit
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What I probably miss the most right now is a way to:
- mute things more easily (especially one shot track elements when sequenced)
- stop sequences for tracks (once youāve started a sequence on a track, thereās no way to stop it, except if you have an empty sequence left that you can jump to. Why canāt you just hit a pad or the screen to do this like it works with loops?)
- change machines for tracks (edit: just found out how to do that)
- record loops without having to hit record and play (like on DT, where the threshold triggers recording regardless of whether the sequencer is playing)
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too early to tell
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Iād love to hear some experience sequencing tracks with DT, to see how adding that sequencer expanda the posibilities.
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Sorry, thatās not how I plan to use it, so I wonāt be able to tell you about that. The MIDI documentation and options are extremely basic, so I assume youād run into issues.
The easiest way to use it would probably be to only sequence a one shot track with an external device, but my guess is that the 16 pad slots wouldnāt correspond to MIDI channels then but to notes, so youād have to use the same MIDI channel for all DT MIDI tracks and choose the root note that correspond to the pad in the Bento one shot track that youāre looking for.
I have no idea if you could control several Bento tracks with DT using different MIDI channels. My assumption is that in its current state, youād always have to go through the auto channel and then DT would sequence whatever track you have selected on Bento. All a guess though, so maybe best to wait till someone got it to try that stuff for you.
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