Fair take! I‘m sure they’ll fix it and it will be great. But I have to say I‘m a bit shocked that Elektron release a machine that fails to perform one of the most important functions it’s being sold to do (auto sampling of multi samples). And ship it with text printed on the plate that actually doesn’t match the functions because they’re not there yet. They’re the last company I would have expected this from.
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Yeah and that is also fair. I believe this is the undo, am I right in saying? I’m still new enough to not know what’s not there I suppose!
Have to be honest I expected it once they got acquired. And one can say “well the takt boxes were more complete…” but those concepts were already designed before the acquisition and were iterated upon with version 2s. The big mess then was overbridge, which was painful since it didn’t come out for a rather long time after they released a 2 output groove box, and it was buggy as hell for quite a while. Still has massive latency.
TV is a brand new platform with a ton more power under the hood. And I am quite sure the PE overlords pushed them to a release date that they would have rather not had. But that is how it is. Even with a small creative company now like Torso, they still are releasing beta boxes that are almost unusable day 1.
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The more I discover the Tonverk the more I feel playing with some kind of an Elektron emulation:
- Plock doesn’t register correctly when working fast (there’s a « WAIT » dialog that’s too frequently open)
- the buses pages feel strange some empty pages (src, amp…) and no FW will fill those pages it’s just not meant to be pages for FX buses
- the page division is not the same as other boxes. On the TV it also divide the trig length. So a trig length of 16 will be 16 trigs instead of a bar. Not sure if I’m liking it it’s just another calc to do to make long patterns with the DNII
- Some stuff aren’t working, undo/redo, trigless trig doesn’t plock buses change…
- encoders doesn’t feel the same (not as smooth as my DNII, they’re kind of grainy when moving. Is it just me?)
- General laggy feeling. I’m working super fast on the DNII, and that’s what I like about Elektron, no fancy screen just very well thought UX to keep you in the flow
I really like Elektron but I’m having a very mixed feeling, it’s been obviously rushed and at this price point I don’t want to be a beta tester. I really hope that FW updates will come soon I’m not sure to keep the box as it is and have 30 days (so 27 days now) to return the product, and I’m kind of pissed of to wait for potential updates without any com from Elektron marketing team
On the other side, this TV has a crazy potential so I don’t know what to do
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Thank you best feedback and honest review so far!
I was thinking to order one but now I think I will pass it on - of course I am with you, I want to make music, I do not have time to beta test for free…
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This is well phrased and I’m on the same page as you are. I really like the whole idea of Tonverk and the hardware user interface is ACE, so well designed and so easy to learn. I just want to use it all the time and tweak all kind of things!
But the software experience: It is slow (for Elektron standards), it has lags, it is unpredictable, it’s missing important features, it doesn’t sync well, and it crashes. I’ve also had two corrupted projects already 
Yes, it’s very frustrating. I might want to like it too much and keep a sort of hope that they will fix all the issues soon. But there are so many issues I’m not sure if it is fixable.
And if I take off the pink glasses, it’s a linux machine in a box, just like the MPC and they never managed to make the platform as slick and fast as the Elektrons.
I just hope I’m wrong.
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This was about multisampling and external clock right, it turned out that it’s not a successful workaround?
Software and especially hardware development is hard financially, PE or no PE. I wouldn’t put a slightly rushed release strictly down to that, margins in music tech are often pretty surprisingly low
I think these get populated if you use them as MIDI tracks
Bitwig and reaper run fine on linux, the linux kernel is fine overall, as now lots of companys do Arm stuff it will be good. Mac os is basically unix derivate, it will get sorted out. Also for Tonverk. Having a rough start isnt very new also.
DN 2 was / is a stellar release, the bar they set is very high.
unfortunately not… after the post I tried again and damn it was here again.
maybe Tonverk has been developed by a brand new team of developers that did not work on the previous machines and have less experience?
Just compare the credits section of the manuals. Not much difference. 44 individuals credited on Tonverk, 41 on Digitone II - 4 of which are new in comparison. Those 4 can also be marketing personnel as much as they can be developers. Nothing to indicate a brand new team here.
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Digitone was an existing product though…making an mk2 is easier than a brand new with a new architecure
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has someone already tested the latency of tonverk when you play sounds realtime and not quantised. the time passing from when you hit the key until the sound comes out of the box. you would have to record the sound if the clack with a mic at the same time for example to check that. i wouldnt be surprised to see something around 20ms like ob.
this would have quite an impact on how imidiate the device feels
I disagree, but that’s a matter of opinion and what you view as new. There are plenty of new things (never done before) in Digitone II besides FM TONE and the underlying similarities with other machines. The same goes for Tonverk itself. Where there are similarities with existing products I think that is quite normal as consistency is expected. That doesn’t mean it’s just copy/paste. And not much of a point comparing it to the original Digitone or Digitakt. There are lots of veterans listed - but depending on your definition of new and how far back you want to go you could also consider them fresh. Poor thing to compare in general.
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No way it is 20ms. From playing bass majority of my life I am real sensitive to stuff like that, and 20 ms is very noticeable when I record with a buffer. I am tapping it right now and do not notice any latency, so if there is any, it’s probably less than 5ms, definitely less than 10.
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It’s running fine on DT2 and DN2 which are also running on rust and the new platform. Some of the laggy behavior was also present on the DT2 at launch but got resolved very quickly. I get being a bit upset with where things are right now, but Elektron always irons those things out.
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I don’t think they are tbh. I think it’s because this basically a Linux arm box, not coded to the metal like previous boxes. Whoever said earlier that it felt like it was “Emulating an Elektron box” was probably more accurate than they thought they were being.
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Saw this earlier but couldn’t get past halfway because he kept playing the same annoying sample while talking, and it had no musicality and nothing to do with what he was saying. He was basically just fiddling & talking lol.
Also he kept talking in circles and didn’t say much more than there’s no auto-loop (fair point, but maybe have a little outline before you start recording).
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