Holy crap. You must feel like this when you write music these days 
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And let’s not forget the complexity !
OT is soon going to look trivial compared to the new generation of fully programmable all-in-one FX-Synth-Sampler-Sequencer boxes…
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There’s no such thing as ‘too much in too small a box’! 
Gives me a headache just looking at it… Sudoku type thing
And I don’t know why there are foot switches on there - this thing is never going on the floor!
A row of knobs would have been nice for direct tactile control of parameters.
Also, I wonder if i’m the only person who doesn’t like the KNOBS YouTube demos?? With his wonky shonky folky guitar all random - I cant tell what the FX is doing most of the time… and all the text, so much text to read.
I bet it sounds good though.
looking forward to the first proper demos…
preferably without a lot of NAMM background noise and distracting “bleeping&blopping” modular neighbor booths 
was almost about to buy a use Eventide H9, but i think i will wait until i know what the Zoia really does g
It has light up buttons, which is a massive plus point as a visual indicator for devices with this much complexity. Needs knobs though. Knobs are great and super essential. Since the organelle picked up more and more dedicated users some people are calling for controllers, more visual information, more knobs, etc. Of course here we know that happens with all devices but when there is so much capability in one thing it sucks to not have control of all of it. Hope each button/parameter has CC’S already there waiting for use.
I had a similarly skeptical reaction the first time I heard of the H9 - I thought “only 1 knob??? How usable can that be???”
I later got one when I found a decent deal, with the intention of using it only on synths, sequencing it from iPad or whatever, so using the iPad app to control it was ok for me. But still later, I made myself learn how to tweak params in case I was caught at band rehearsal or onstage without iPad - it’s actually not that bad.
So what I learned from using my H9 is that the Zoia’s single knob does not have to be a deal-killer for me - it all depends on what the workflow looks like. The H9 does not require a lot of button combos to access params for knob tweaking.
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There’s always the Axoloti… if you don’t mind building everything apart from the PCB and i/o yourself from scratch, obviously.
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The H9 only ever has one static effect chain going though right? Different concept than a playable instrument with synth parameters etc
I don’t understand what you mean by “static effect chain”
Hmm, I don’t know what I mean either. Essentially I should be saying - you don’t mind scrolling to adjust wet/dry, scrolling to adjust decay - not being able to do both at the same time? It would be incredibly frustrating with just one knob to control every parameter on say - a Minimoog. You could probably put together an emulation of a minimoog on this thing - tantalising, but controlling it would be a bastard.
Yep, but from an OT or DT, you wouldn’t care that much about H9 having no knobs, given all the CCs are available.
Zola is different in the sense that the extremely small grid interface seems to be way more that automatisable through CCs. The whole workflow seems to be about pushing these tiny pads, maybe a couple of them at the same time…
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On the H9, virtually all presets map wet/dry mix to the Z button - press Z, and you can adjust the wet/dry quickly… Some presets have decay mapped to X or Y. Press X to adjust decay, press Z to go back to wet/dry, press X to tweak decay again… in writing it sounds like it could be frustrating, but in practice it’s pretty fast. I do admit I’d rather have the iPad app running if I want to get into deeper tweaking, because the mutlitouch interface… but without the iPad I’m talking about quick onstage adjustments, when you don’t really have the time to screw around with your patch.
Anyway, I’m just saying for me the single knob is not an instant deal killer based on my H9 experience. I was not trying to convince you that you are wrong because you don’t like single knob pedals - I am guessing that was your motivation to respond to my post
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Ah ok! I’m kinda hoping this goes beyond ‘pedal’ into full featured ‘everything’ territory like Organelle - seems like it could in a step sequencer-y way 
Organelle got more interesting when the Mutable Instruments code started getting ported over - from modules like Braids and Clouds. It uses a well-established, mature platform in Pure Data - so there’s that.
Zoia’s is unknown - maybe it’s just a Nord modular-like environment in which you can play with some software objects but can’t write any yourself.
Axolotl seems to be more technically powerful than Organelle, but you have to build your own case and UI. I’m pretty bad at building stuff myself. Also, I don’t know if anyone has done FX patches for it on the level of Empress or Mutable - not saying that they don’t exist - but it’s an unknown for me.
Monome Aleph had some promise on paper but peeps said the dev. toolkit was too hard to use. ER301 looks headed towards a similar fate.
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There’s been some sterling work done using the Mutable Instruments code, Braids in particular being lots of generative fun on the Axoloti.
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The coding is much more intimidating for Axoloti and the others you mention, something that puts me off - what’s more aside from 24bit vs 16bit audio, I’m not aware of any technical advantage of Axoloti? Organelle has 1Ghz and 500MB RAM vs Axolotis 168Mhz and 8MB.
The Mutables Stuff getting ported over is really cool for sure, love those but the strength of the Organelle in my opinion is in C&G’s own patches and the many Shreeswifty has put together over time. Lots of stuff that you just couldn’t find on any other hardware else with a physical interface. It’s the mixture of effects and techniques usually associated with laptops (granular effects and synths, dynamic spectral stuff), being inside something with keys and knobs - that’s exciting. Critter and Guitari actually employed the kind of modular idea in the Zoia into a patch of theirs recently - called 1008. It’s name comes from the 1008 different combinations available in the patch. You choose from one of 5 or so sequencer/arpeggiator types, same number of synths/samplers (which you can change samples and parameters for), choose from 13 different effects to apply to the end of the chain.
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Axoloti seems great, and I love tweaking/building stuff inside software modular environments, but sometimes I just want to get on with it and make some music, instead of spending hours/days/weeks/months adjusting a patch until the user interface/sound is at a level I’m satisfied with. Devices like this seem like a happy medium between the two, and I’m very interested in getting more information about the workflow (I’ve emailed empress asking for a demo unit so I can make a video, even though I’m a relative nobody, but hey, 60k views on a TE-commissioned pocket operator video must count for something, right…?)
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This was what somebody at TipTop Audio said on the MW forum:
Axoloti runs at 16 sample buffers so the I/O latency is under 3ms and the code is efficient enough that it can do a fair amount on the Cortex M4. DSP is fixed not floating point on the Axoloti, which has up and down sides. Sync and control via the MIDI DIN is pretty responsive, with only the audio latency as a factor.
The Axoloti software is a Java app which looks a whole lot like the Nord editor, but it lacks some of the higher level stuff of the Nord (not that the Nord app was polished though!). You have to build the patch in the software, down load it to the board and then tweak parameters. Changing any of the patch modules requires building and downloading it again. Loading patches and audio off the SD card is possible and playing audio clips works quite well.
Axoloti is made for hardware hackers to attach their own controls, sensors and output to the board. You can set up MIDI CC controls as shown with the Push. One of those methods has to be done to control the Axoloti without a PC though.
I’ve used the Cortex A9 CPU used in the the Organelle for about 3 years. When I first received the early eval board audio interfacing was completely busted on the chip! After working with a CPU engineer for a few months applying firmware and kernel changes, the A9 could handle duplex stereo 16/44.1 audio. Unfortunately, that is the limit of the CPUs audio interfaces so higher bit and sample rate multi-channel TDM is impossible.
The single A9 is pretty much like running Pd on Linux with an old Pentium 3 laptop. I was not impressed with the Single core A9 for audio: latency was never below about 15ms and even 50% CPU load could cause dropouts. The Organelle manual mentions keeping the load under 75%, but that is best case in my experience. Switching to the Dual core A9 and applying some kernel and Pd massaging got latency under 8ms with an entire 100% of a core running DSP. If the C+G has a CPU card (which it very likely does), swapping a Dual in and changing the kernel would halve latency and double DSP performance.
Source: https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2116564&highlight=#2116564
But you know what, with all due respect for the TipTop guy, in the time that has passed since that post, people have been doing stuff with Organelles and seem to be enjoying them anyway.
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Didn’t know that the Mutable code made it to the Axoloti. The more the merrier!