Yep. They were quick with Response and are going to send out a new unit hopefully today…
I really love this little box.
Wish me luck on round 2 ![]()
Yep. They were quick with Response and are going to send out a new unit hopefully today…
I really love this little box.
Wish me luck on round 2 ![]()
Hey just thought I’d chime in here! I bought a BENTO when they went on preorder. 10% off at Detroit modular which was a good deal! I had issues with the unit I received, and sent it back for replacement. The new one has worked perfectly - and the new beta that was released this weekend is working very well for me. I have a feeling that a bad batch got through the QC step, and made it to the wild.
The new song mode although not perfect, is a BIG step toward making this a viable unit. I’ve bought and sold MC707, circuit tracks, deluge OLED, polyend tracker, MPC live II, M8 tracker and this is the first box I can actually make a decent track on without having to refer to a manual, or strain what brain power I have left to achieve something.
Is it rough? Yes it is, in some areas. But the capabilities (in my opinion) outweigh the hassles of jumping onboard out of the chute. I have it playing 8 tracks - one of which is an external track with a TEMPERA granular synth, with MIDI going out and audio coming into the Bento’s mixer. All good. The 1010 sample playback sounds like the blackbox - which to me is very, very good.
So my 2 cents - if ya can tolerate things being added as we go - get one. If you want the polished user experience you would get out of an Ableton PUSH 3 or similar - wait a bit longer. 1010 has been very responsive to feedback/input. I believe they will continue to work on this until it fulfills the potential it has.
short video I made showing song mode - beta release
And the sound you hear throughout is NOT a goat. It’s my severe macaw Q, who likes to be a part of everything I’m doing. You’ll see him at the end!
Like I’ve posted a bit further up, I’ve had a comparable experience after playing around with looper on the latest non beta OS. Everything was fine after I started it back up, but before that, I had this crazy loud noise that almost destroyed my ears and it fried itself.
It’s good to know they sent you another one, but it still made me wonder if I should send it back within my 30 days money back frame that will soon end. I really like it though and am looking forward to when it will hopefully be reliable and fully featured.
Please let us know if any issues occur with your replacement unit.
You got it.
The new unit should be here Wednesday afternoon.
what? really? can’t find anything about it. are you being ironic?
EDIT: They are not allowing any nanobox to boot up as a tangerine, lemondrop or fireball depending on SD card. I asked on their forum. But it’s a really cool idea. I think it would sell tons of nanos. It would also kinda be a risky business decision.
It has a granular synth inside so is being ‘promoted’ as having the Lemondrop inside as it apparently offers the same capability. Not that I’ve got one or used it but read it here.
You can select output 1-3 for each track. You can’t set different outputs for elements within a track (like different loops within the looper). Headphones will always have the master of all tracks on it afaik.
Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but I didn’t see it.
Does the Bento have to ability to send out program changes on its midi tracks, to connected synths and stuff?
Thanks
Midi out isn’t even available yet…i think.
In the new beta it can send MIDI out. It can also bring the external device audio back in via one of the three inputs. Not sure how extensive the MDI is at this point, but there is a setting for control change data channel for external gear. I don’t know if that’s working yet. I just tried having it play a sequence.
Did they update this in the beta so that the MIDI track also plays back audio from a dedicated input at the same time? Meaning you’ll only need one track for both sequencing and listening to an external source? If so, this would be huge!
So far, this is only possible via the looper and only if you sample an external source or while you’re in the looper and have activated monitoring for the audio input xm you want to listen to.
Not sure if I follow you exactly on this - but - the external synth I am using is connected to MIDI out on bento. Then audio from that external unit is routed to input 1 (of 3) on the bento. The track on the bento uses the same track number in the mixer etc. So track 8 on the bento for example shows the sequence as track 8 and the audio as track 8. I hope that makes sense and is what you are hoping for!
Thanks, I was just asking if the new MIDI track will also provide the audio from the synth I’m sequencing if I connect that synth to one of Bento’s audio outputs. On Elektrons, MIDI tracks can never carry any audio.
They did. Tested this yesterday. ![]()
Fantastic! Does the beta OS run well for you?
I think it’s great they managed to fuse MIDI and audio tracks. That being said, it also tells you something about how far this product is when they can still decide to combine/alter two of the features that were already listed as features on the product page when I bought it a month ago.
More or less. It is very obviously a beta with quite a few hickups and bugs here and there, and some UI-inconsistensies that all need ironing our before I would be confident enough to bring this to a live set. But as long as they keep developing to plan I can see this as a really great product in the very near future.
It will never compete with a DAW, so I would not want to call it a “DAW in a box”, but for certain needs it can be a good alternative. I wanted a box that can launch pre-prepared stems and loops in a live set, while at the same time jelling great with other gear like Digitakt, synths etc. While not being a laptop.
Oh yes, the sequencer now has a quantized setting that’s like the “change” parameter on Elektrons. They really added a lot of the stuff that kept it from being useful for actually building tracks on the device itself.
Edit: I’ve just checked the new OS and something I wanted to try sooner. I can confirm that you can route an internal track to any of the outputs, send it into FX pedals, and send those back into Bento without feedback. You can use the new external track type to listen to the incoming audio from these pedals and slam some more FX, filter, modulation on it. You can also go into the looper and record the input that your FX pedals go into, or I suppose you could route the audio track with the pedal signal to another output and record that in the looper, if you want to include the added Bento FX, LFOs etc. that are on the external track with the pedal signal. This is fantastic stuff and will hopefully make me integrate my CBA pedals a lot more!