just got around to updating my a4mkii. The three updates I was most looking forward to:
[MKII] The Analog Four MKII now supports class compliant audio over USB.
hell yea. Tip: you need to enable USB audio in the USB config menu before you can access USB audio options in the Audio Routing menu. But it looks sweet; there’s a lot of options for routing. USB audio can be routed to/from the main out, the ext input, the individual voices, or stereo pairs of voices. Dope.
Works fine with my iPhone (with the lightning-USB3 adapter). Works okay with my computer and Audacity, but sometimes is unstable with audio rates. Sometimes playback would get weirdly pitch shifted; sounded about a minor third, which is almost exactly the ratio of 48000/44100, so I suspect some audio rate mismatch issues. Could be my laptop’s fault; I didn’t dive in much.
[MKII] Simultaneously pressing four or more trig keys could in some cases lead to double-triggered keys.
Something I was happy to see. I think it actually affects 3-button presses too, not just 4+. The biggest bummer was with perf mode mutes; if you tried toggling 3+ tracks at once, a lot of the time it would whiff and only toggle some of them at random. Looks to be more stable now; I can’t get any partial hits.
Unfortunately, 3+ simultaneous presses seems to be a hair less sensitive. If I very quickly tap 1 or 2 buttons, it gets it. But if I very quickly tap 3+, it misses all of them reliably. I have to be just a hair more deliberate and a little less percussive with it…
Some parameters were too sensitive when snapping to values using the [FUNC] key.
I was also happy to see this note (LFO depths, for example, were a bit fiddly to hit 0 exactly). But I’m a bit disappointed. It appears that they “reduced the sensitivity” just by limiting the refresh rate, not by reducing knob angle sensitivity. It makes it a bit easier to dial in these sensitive parameters, but it’s still fiddly:
- It feels laggy, because it is. It’s effectively lowering the “frame rate” of the knobs when FUNC is held.
- Because the angle sensitivity hasn’t changed, it’s still easy to hit the wrong value. The lagginess makes it a bit easier to release FUNC when it hits the desired value, but if you’re not quick, the sensitivity issue is exactly the same as it used to be. Take the LFO depth parameter; if you slowly rotate the knob, it’s still only like a few degrees rotation to snap to the next value.
- For any parameters with many snap values (e.g. snapping oscillator pitch by octaves, or the new note length snaps), it now takes a long time to scroll through values, because it will only increment values about 3 times per second.
So it’s nice that they tried to make it better, but I’m probably not going to use the FUNC snap feature any more than I used to.
