What should I say to you? I am not an engineer or a developer, I am a customer. I think it’s not easy to build an instrument of any kind. I gave my point of view on the product, isn’t that why forums exist? I didn’t write it on the “ndlr lover” tread. I’m sure you can find it well but you can always improve, right?
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I agree with you. I owned a NDLR but sold it after 1 month. The most negative part of it are the too clicky buttons. Using it in a room where also other people are, the clicky buttons annoyed them. At this moment I use a Squarp Pyramid, and this does the job well. It needs some more input from the user but when you have mastered it, it’s a great device. But, just as the NDLR, it’s much too expensive for what it does.
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The noise of the keys did not bother me much, apart from entering and exiting the menus the rest I could control it quite easily either from ableton or from OT. (also my OT mk1 when I insert trig quickly makes a bit of noise but I don’t even notice it even if I tried those of the mk2 and they are much better) The problem I found is that sometimes everything worked, sometimes it didn’t take the commands, sometimes it took them after a few moments 
I can agree with this. The choice of buttons could have been better.
I’ve never experienced any lag with mine. Issue still happens are a firmware restore?
Or is this lag coming from when you are controlling it externally only?
especially on ableton both with internal clock and sent by daw, it was not always present but came and went. It was the sum of this and the feeling with the knobs that made me hate the whole experience of use.
You dont have a screen on the T-1 but you have scales and userscales so you can make any chord you want. Of course it does voicings in key, that’s what the voicings knob is for.
Punching in a scale and chord is different than setting a key and then getting a 4th maj7 chord and then quickly getting a sus 6th chord.
On the T-1, you can do it, but not as fast. You’d have to change the pitch, alter some notes, and make sure you did it in a different cycle.
These are not bad things. I was pointing out the workflow differences. Which are significant.
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I really like the NDLR a lot. Although a little expensive, my device functions as advertised and is great to …ehhhm… noodle with and zone out/loose track of time.
That said, the UI is pretty rudimentary and not for everyone, I guess. Also the advanced features (chord sequencer, the mysterious rotation algorithm) are not that user friendly and confusing.
I get the idea that it became abandonware, because updates are very sparse and communication about the further development is lacking.
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A half year ago I had contact with the developer of the NDLR. He told me that all wished features are implemented and that the CPU has reached it’s limits. It indeed looks like abandonware but the NDLR has reached it’s endpoint. Beside the high price and very clicky buttons it is a great device.
I really hate developers/engineers who prefer to save 10 bucks and choose the microchip with just enough memory… this is not 1990. The RAM of our phones is 3-4 GB and people building hardware with 384 kb mem … because that’s more than we ever need?
Ah, okay. A bit misguided then by the “Under Construction” message I get when pushing some encoders in menu mode.
Yeah, always amazes me too.
I know they were/are busy with another project. So in that case, it looks like abandonware.
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Besides the MRCC (MIDI Router)?
It’s not nearly that simple, especially if you want good realtime performance and don’t have a big team available to do system optimization. What’s available in terms of large-memory microcontrollers (as opposed to microprocessors, like we have in phones) has also changed a fair bit in the ~7 years since design started on the NDLR.
For reference, this is the fastest true microcontroller that you can (or could, if they weren’t out of stock globally) buy right now: Teensy® 4.1. That’s 600Mhz, 32bit, single core, with a wild 17MB of ram if you max it out. If you want to deal with the hassle of actually shipping a Linux box, you can totally get better hardware, but now you have a whole other world of complexity, jitter, waiting for stuff to boot, etc.
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I don’t know
Yeah I tend to blend out the complexity of things …from tinkering a lot with ESPs, Arduinos and Pis/Linux where I barely scratch the surface but run into problems in every step …especially with realtime.
Let’s start a company and build an audio chip like an A14x/M1. Not impossible, I’d say.
Sure! Got, say, ten billion laying around?
These are spectacularly expensive design processes that are only really in reach for the Fortune 50, and where you need guaranteed unit sales in the hundreds of millions to justify the cost.
Audio-levels of realtime computing in otherwise simple-to-build, low cost devices are a very niche use case. It’s getting easier — there are starting to be some realtime Linux distros put together to lower the complexity on that end, and the microcontroller market is getting better too — and from this, we’re seeing a really renaissance in novel sequencers, VA synths, effects units, you name it. However, the audio use case is unlikely to ever be a good fit for most commodity hardware, and if that changes, it will be entirely accidental. Even large, well-staffed teams in the audio world have a hard time working with semiconductor supply chains that are designed much, much faster design time-frames and much larger unit counts. I’ve heard some amazing and frustrating stories from an engineer at a very large digital mixer company along these lines.
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