A third demo with @darenager 303 sounds. I recorded them all in one go. Loading them up on youtube takes more time 
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Very nice @Unifono keep em coming!
@v00d00ppl seems like a great team! Nice track too!
Not me brother I was just sharing the clip. That guy is pushing the squid like a Rally Car in the Italian mountains. I think I will get a Squid soon and do the same combo.
Ah ok, well just when I thought I’d ruled out getting a squid too, thanks for posting anyway 
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Hi everyone. It has been a very long time since I have posted anyplace on Elektronauts. I have been reading through this incredibly long thread with interest. It helped me decide to buy a MC 707. It should be arriving in the next couple of days.
It is going to take me a while to get used to the device. This is just my second Roland thing ever. The first was a stage piano that my son has been using at college and now grad school and has held up really well. It was a great buy at the time.
So now I am looking into it a bit and see this Zenology thing which seems pretty cool. I am probably okay with the $99/year membership to get the Pro version or looking into a lifetime key for the Pro version. I see many of the preset packs are compatible with the MC 707, but also that many are not. The ones that are not compatible appear to be sampled instruments (pianos, etc).
What I don’t really understand (yet) is whether there is a tool in Zenology Pro that allows the user to restrict sound design to compatibility with a specific Roland product like the MC 707 or whether such a tool is even necessary for the Zen-core engine.
Anyway, does anyone know? I see some folks like @darenager are working on preset packs.
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After debating for months, I finally purchased a MC-707. I mostly plan to use it as a sound module with other hardware sequencers. However, the added flexibility to use it as a standalone unit is also a selling point, especially if a record pre-count is included in a future update.
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@Gribs When you use Zenology pro you can choose not to install the expansions or whatever they are called, I didn’t and you make your sounds on Zenology then export, it gives an option for zc1/hardware compatibility which is what you use.
Personally I don’t think the Zenology app is very good yet, there are a few things which are a bit of a pain:
No rescaling to fit your display it has preset zoom levels only and at 1080p you have a choice of 100% (tiny) or 125% (barely readable) so forget about it if you are using a laptop or anything other than a large display.
Some of the parameters can’t be controlled by midi, so this can be a real pain, and some parameters on the hardware don’t have parameters on Zenology, for example fx sends are not part of a Zenology patch, but mfx is.
It is actually better to edit on the 707 itself IMHO, I used Zenology pro for the free trial, but there are a number of reasons why I chose not to buy/rent it, including those mentioned, but also because of the way sound files are implemented in 707/101, I think that currently they need to do some work in these areas before I’d reconsider.
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Hey, @darenager, thanks for the in-depth response!
When my MC 707 arrives (supposed to be tomorrow), I will make a Roland account and check out the free version of Zenology just to check the GUI. I am an old guy (55) and GUIs that are too small are a pet peeve. I haven’t gone 4K with my home laptop (ThinkPad workstation P50) or PC but my work laptop is 4K.
There is plenty to work through before I get to the point of programming my own sounds from scratch.
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One other thing to bear in mind, some of the parameters are in different places, things like level have multiple places where they can be adjusted, and these are different in Zenology to 707/101.
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Got it, thanks again.
I started watching some Zenology and Zenology Pro videos.
You know, this hammers home what an excellent deal you can get in the Novation Circuit and Ultranova products with their included editors. My son has an Ultranova that I bought him to use as a combo synth and sound card and I have a Circuit that I grabbed once when it was on sale.
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Yeah Roland need to do a proper editor for 101/707 really, it could still be useful with Zenolgy via import/export, but purpose built for the job of editing the hardware.
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Ok, I’ve tried to pay attention but I missed some details regarding clips and clip-chaining.
I want to do a cover of “Rydeen” - at least the basic drum part, bass, and synth riff. Are the clip/clip-chaining features in MC-101 usable enough for me to program in this song without having to manually change patterns unless I want to?
Roland even does not really need to develop it themselves.
yes, i’m talking about SysEx implementation again.
i bet it is already there, just disabled for whatever reasons.
Yowza, I just went through the hoops required to get Zenology Lite installed to check it out and the GUI is indeed poorly scaled. There are scalings shown in the menu that are grayed out, too. I can barely read the smallest sized text, including the text in the preset browser.
The main problem with clip chains is that any clip that chains to a following clip will cut off any decaying audio from the previous clip. So in any chain of more than two - which is most chains - each clip will start by completely cutting off the previous clip’s audio. This means they’re of no unless all your clips end in silence - cymbal rides, decaying pads and lead notes, they’ll all be truncated.
Another practical consideration is that you can’t create certain arrangements unless you plan ahead. Consider this: you want your clip chain to go 1>2>1>3. You can’t do this, because clip 1 can only link to either 2 or 3, not both. So here you’d have to copy clip 1 to clip 4, and have 1>2>4>3. Obviously this is only a problem with certain arrangements, and you can factor it in, but it’s different from most ‘song modes’ that will let you create a playlist of tracks, and it does limit your ability to reuse sequences.
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Thanks. This clarifies the comments I’ve seen from various users here about the MC-101 being best suited to sketching out songs rather than full productions.
Sounds like I can cover “Rydeen” with this thing just fine, if I just use it to play the drum, bass, and simple synth parts. No part of the song relies on decaying/trailing sounds.
Hi @NickD, thank you for the info. I ordered the thing for sketches and messing around then recording to a DAW over USB audio. Clips cutting each other off is cheesy, as is not being able to reuse previous clips to make a song structure. That is silly IMO.
I seem to remember that the newer Electribes suffer from patterns cutting each other off as well.
While no gear is free of criticisms, the surprisingly positive reports and video/audio from Unifono, darenager, papertiger, etc. are what got me interested in the MC-101 in the first place.
I can always record stuff that needs long trails/decays using something else. I’ve got enough multitrack recording options to do that.
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I have my MC 707 now. I updated the firmware and started messing with it.
Something that I have not seen posted anywhere despite searching (maybe my search skills are not so good) and that is not in the manual is that the factory SD card size is 8 GB. I expected this much but it is not mentioned in the specs on Roland’s web site and it is not given in the 28 places the term “SD card” appears in the PDF version of the manual! I ordered a couple of 32 GB SDHC cards from Amazon, which unfortunately is the maximum size for the SDHC standard used by the MC 707.
I have the unit connected to Bitwig right now and it is receiving audio from a random soft synth plugin I put on a track to test. I can listen to the plugin on the headphones and over the main outputs on the MC 707. I haven’t tried going the other way, yet, but Bitwig is telling me that it can see 10 stereo pairs of inputs from the MC 707. So now I start learning.
I am not going to buy any presets yet. I went through a bunch of the previews and they sound okay and a few sound really good, but none of them are burning a hole in my pocket and the unit has thousands to try already. A lifetime key for Zenology Pro is $229, which is okay given what it does and how it sounds, provided Roland fixes the scaling issue. Otherwise it is too expensive, even if it does load all sorts of sounds from Roland.
Yes, I’ve heard that about the Electribes too. The cutting off issue is definitely on Roland’s radar. It’s not clear whether it’s a design decision or a bug, but there’s a similar issue where monophonic voices can become temporarily polyphonic (or at least duplicated) on a clip transition. Paired with the LFO issues (drifting sync and no real S&H), I suspect these devices are simply pushing in too many directions - not in terms of hardware capability, but in terms of development. The 8S, in comparison, is a more straightforward device and, so far, frustration-free.
I do feel a little cynical that these shortcomings haven’t been picked up in many (if any) reviews and demos, although again it may be a factor of the device’s breadth (and there’s no argument that it delivers in a lot of areas). I think the 101 is probably less likely to frustrate as there’s less opportunity to go off-piste with it. As a sound source for a DAW, it’ll do a great job - one thing it definitely can do is sound good.