Introducing Tonverk

[rtme]

Mine arrived this afternoon, I was very enthusiastic the last few days and so looking forward to try it out myself and the first impressions are very positive:

• Tonverk is VERY EASY to use if you know one of the DT/ST/DN devices
• Excellent sound quality!
• The FX are very nice (DAISY DELAY and CHRONO PITCH are awesome)
• Many insert FX slots!
• SD card
• USB-C
• Form factor (and it really looks and feels awesome IRL)
• Beautiful crafted art work!

Unfortunately I also came across these things:

@JhnWilhlm

The software is quite unfinished. Really basic functions are missing and I’m not even talking about stretching and slicing but page loop, instrument previews and other really important stuff.

@JhnWilhlm

wow… the fun is fading pretty quickly. multisampling is totally useless. notes are very often delayed. very unpredictable results.

@JhnWilhlm

and if you try to rename a multisampled instruments you can not

Regarding the autosampler: If you press the [YES] button multiple times in step 1 to test the autosampler you can see the latency going from around 17ms to about 185ms. Which is also happening during sampling so the results are indeed useless.

Which tells me there are some serious issues regarding realtime audio processing going on. The many reported syncing issues probably have the same cause.

And there are unfortunately many other things:

• Boot time is very slow compared to other Elektrons
• Scrolling is sometimes very sluggish
• No zooming for longer samples (very much needed!)
• Some instruments (factory content) are not previewable (I get ticking noises, the instruments do load fine however)
• Autosampled instruments cannot be edited or adjusted at all
• When you load a preset on a track with an existing preset, the settings of the insert FX are kept from the existing one (very annoying!)
• No velocity modulation
• Very bare bone configuration options (regarding MIDI channels etc.)
• …

Some I can live with, as most bugs and missing features will be resolved with firmware updates (there is even a card in the box that says “check for updates!” ) and some things are annoying but doable, no piece of gear is perfect.

But these latency issues (exposed by the autosampler and reported syncing issues) made me a bit sad, as I really like other Elektron devices because of their stability and real-time behaviour. This feels like a bit sluggish and like computer problems (latency, buffer size etc) which I do not want with my hardware sampler / groovebox.

So until now Tonverk feels a bit rushed if I’m honest, and this is a shame as the potential is there…