can verify, i was getting the same behavior, and at tim’s suggestion sliced up a spare usb-microusb cable, cutting the red wire, and it worked great after that =D at least audio from iphone to m8, i haven’t done anything with midi yet.
To be clear the issue is that the M8 battery charger gets confused with Apple products as they are providing power but not enough / fluctuates, causing the M8 to crash. I have been trying to work out a decent solution on firmware but I still have not had much luck.
There are a few options:
- Use the camera connection kit that has the extra lightening port on it, plug a charger into that.
- Use a USB hub that has external power.
- Only use it with the M8 when the M8 has plenty of battery life.
- Modify a spare USB micro cable as described above. Cut the red wire.
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for me, i have the camera connection kit with additional lightning, and it doesn’t work better even with the external charge… i’ll do a cable…
Double tip!
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Haven’t dug into touchscreen modulation yet? A great way to get started is mapping X to the DJ filter!
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Has your M8 suddenly stopped making all sound? And you’ve spent an hour troubleshooting? Restoring firmware? Generally pulling out hair? Maybe you mapped X to the DJ filter and then brushed the edge of the screen causing it to close all the way
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My video documenting the best moment of the past two years… when the M8 arrived. Including a hardware review. Spoiler: It’s awesome.
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Anyone tried hooking the M8 up to the Digitakt via midi. 8 synths matching up nicely to the 8 midi tracks in the Digitakt…
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Oh man. I also have some switches on order but I didn’t even think about swapping caps. Thanks for that (and by “thanks” I mean, “curse you for throwing me down this rabbit hole!”)
EDIT: For those similarly afflicted, I think the term you want to search for is “kailh choc caps”. I had some luck at mkultra.click, but YMMV depending on what country you’re in, etc.
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Thank you so much for pointing this out. P lock galore. Took me 5 minutes to make the weirdest FM drum loop i’ve ever made. This is going to be fun.
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Not even sure when one of these would be available, but I’ve been thinking about getting one for the tour bus (sounds way more glamorous than it is). Now that we can spread out on couches and bunks, I thought a small, portable device would be a great way to pass the time and I’m hearing some shockingly great sounds coming out of the M8. I tried reNoise for about half a day watching tutorials and decided life was too short. And what I came up with musically in that half day was idiotic! I have zero experience with the tracker approach apart from that miserable half day. My first day on the OT was a tad frustrating learning some basics, but I had an interesting (to me) track unlike anything I’d done before by the end of the first day. The form factor of the M8 is just so appealing because I spend so many hours in a bus every week. Has anyone with no tracker experience had a good time on their M8?
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I specifically bought the M8 (first batch) for the tour bus, with no prior tracker experience, and it’s a blast.
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Yes! M8 is my first tracker. Have had it for a little over a week. I picked it up pretty quickly, workflow is extremely simple. I know it’s a little too early to truly tell as I’m in the honey moon phase but I think I like it more than the other portable options I have (OP-1, OP-Z, Deluge).
If you’re coming from Elektron gear this makes 100% sense and I think I like this form factor way more for portability than something where I’m trying to input notes with a keyboard or pads, where space is constrained like in a car or bus or plane, this just makes way more sense.
Have had lots of fun, the interface looks like it might be dull to work with or intimidating even but its really not much different than using any other groove box.
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Here’s my first track with the M8 hardware. I love this thing!
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I subscribe to your channel and love what you do for sure 
Watched a very good and super basic beginner tutorial (actually a few) from a YouTube channel called Electronisound. It was helpful as he kept repeating the basic steps over and over just to make a fairly basic beat, then resampled the beat. I was happy that he repeated the steps so many times so I could get more comfortable with basic concepts. I will buy an M8 as soon as one is available to purchase. I just find the workflow potentially daunting even compared to an OT, which I’m fairly decent with
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Yeah I was feeling kind of the same until I actually got mine (coming from the digitakt as my go to sampler/sequencer) there are a lot of nice little tool tips and stuff that helped me get over the hump of everything getting thrown at me. Especially when before I had tried LSDJ and LPT and not really gelled with them at all. M8 is pretty dang easy to get into coming from elektron devices I would say. There are definitely things that are a bit annoying when compared to elektrons but also things that are better.
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Is it looking like the non-preorder options will be online by Halloween, or is it more likely you will be filling preorders into November?
It will probably start in November. I have to take care of preproduction for the next batch and website stuff as well as take it a bit easy. Preorders have been finished since about the 15th.
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i felt the same but the workflow looks harder watching a video than it does when you are using it. I’d never used a tracker before but it’s not that far away from an elektron box but with the advantage you can always see where your parameter locks and trigs are
all the ui stuff is extremely well thought out in terms of being logical and helpful. there’s a lot of meaningful feedback on what you are doing
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To also chime in:
Mine being in the last preorder batch, I only got it a few days ago. No prior tracker experience aside from fiddling a bit with LSDJ, ProTracker II and ReNoise in preparation.
You´ll have the basics down as fast as with an Elektron device, probably faster. The beauty of it is that you can go really deep with tables and stuff, but even at the surface level it really is a powerful device.
Feels surreal to have so much capability in such a small form factor. If it had only one of the synths or the sampler, it would already be an awesome machine, but with all this stuff it´s just ridiculous…
The only things you´ll have to get over at the very beginning are a few basic shortcuts, the song > chain > phrase > instrument > table layout and the hex numbers. The first two become second nature really fast, the hex stuff will take time but in practice having a rough idea of how it works will suffice.
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Thanks a lot!
Watching video tutorials on it can be tricky, and make it seem harder than it is. The beauty of the Game Boy style layout is that it is like… gamified, and so you commit the controls to memory far faster than you think you will. I write music on the M8 way faster than I would on any other device.
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I’m considering trying to get a M8 as a possible solution to not being able to procure a MnM and I’m just wondering…
Can you play/live record a Midi keyboard into it unquantized and maybe even polyphonically?
Can it Midi sequence program changes?
And lastly, is it true that it has USB Midi, but is not a USB host?