Yes, we will have to wait a bit with releasing the MKI OS.
8 Likes
Understandable but at least it’s not a showstopper 
Glad the team is working out the kinks.
2 Likes
Fine by me. I’m very excited for the conditional trigs but I need my MKI stable for live gigs!
Thanks for being open about the issue rather than just quietly holding back the update. I work with software in my day job and I see it go through various states of stability. It happens and no one is immune to software bugs.
3 Likes
Great! More time that WON’T be spend fixing all the digitakt problems. Starting to think elektron bit off more than they can chew.
Thats cool you guys posted 
1 Like
Was under the impression the mk1 &mk2 were going to use the exact same OS (no porting involved)?
Anyway thanks for stepping in Simon to announce state of play.
I think we need to remember that elektron isnt a huge company. im sure more people are happy
than the amount of people bothered about waiting a few months for updates, once its out its out forever so surely a wait wont hurt anyone. It would be worse if elektron hadnt released anything since digitakt, the more they release the more money the company has and the more they will expand in the future. And that = faster updates. But we’ve got to remember how slim the market actually is for fairly technically complicated £1000 music boxes in a world where infinite instruments are downloadable for a fraction of the price and/or free. I think a lot of mark 2 owners actually already had a mark 1. They arent selling TVs or phones on a global scale, theyre a niche small company in sweden that make synthesizers and samplers for a fairly paticular kind of musician, amongst hundreds of other synth companies who are way way bigger. I understand your frustration but good things come to those who wait 
4 Likes
While I generally agree, I’m still kind of annoyed at this one. I upgraded from an MK1 for a considerable amount of money and end up with a machine that for the time being does less than the one I had before?! That’s a tough one to swallow.
1 Like
The state of OT MKII on its release is a joke. It has some heavy defects that make the device nearly unusable/unstable/unreliable.
Hey, it took to me one single day to discover that scene bug. That issue is a showstopper, to be honest. Other guys got the freezing issue in several days, too. And there are many smaller but annoying issues with this device. I doubt Elektron shouldn’t have fixed these defects before launching. They must have been aware of the problems.
People buy such instruments to make music immediately after turning it on for the first time. And many of them want to play it on stage and gain profit from the performances.
I have no problem with the fact that a firmware needs some patches or updates to make them nearly complete. This is how the software evolves. However those breaking issues, major bugs force people to become testers for weeks or months and make them wait for updates as well as promised but missing features and they just have to find workarounds for those issues meanwhile. I’m sort of tech man, so I’m also doing this. However I’m far from being a happy customer now
4 Likes
Thanks for the info, appreciated.
Keep up the faith! I’m sure you’ll sort things out soon and life will go on.
Are you guys new to technology or something? Things are released with bugs; it’s a given.
Elektron is good enough to open a thread acknowledging it, ensuring they’re working on it, and ya’ll just use it to throw serious shade.
Jesus. Find a hobby. Like music.
2 Likes
Is it that bad? Its definitely a shame, its obviously easier for me to not be annoyed when I stuck with my mark 1. Im pretty surprised actually but it just goes to show what adding minor changes to a product can cause in bugs so imagine adding whole new features, its no wonder they called it a day
Not to create a wrong impression here. It’s just that my MK1 has been nothing but rock solid, while within a very short time frame I’ve had a couple of crashes on the MK2. We’re not talking maxing out the machine just playing a few samples on a couple of tracks.
Maybe not the best thread to discuss the disappointment, sry for that. I just read @jb’s post and wanted to maintain the balance
I also appreciate Elektron’s above statement as well as their effort to fix the issues in general. I also help them in doing so by submitting bug reports with details on how to reproduce if I can. (And yes, sometimes I’m wrong.)
On the other hand this behavior is the very minimum a customer can expect from the company he or she purchased a product from.
One more word please. While anybody may express their opinion on the products here as a customer (it’s not always useful to do it, I agree, but it can’t damage the way of feeling ), I’m not sure people are aware of what hobby those posters really have 
Peace.
1 Like
IMHO there is only one constructive way for us Nauts to make these instruments better. It’s reporting, in the most precise way you can, any feedback you have on the machine that encounters a dysfunction.
Generalizations and ranting never ever did good for the cause (this one being playing ace reliable instruments). This is my opinion.
10 Likes
You must have not been around for the very rocky start of the original Octatrack OS updates. The OS was unfinished and far from rock solid. The fact that there were still outstanding bugs even after the very last updates indicates the complexity of the problem.
Adding conditional triggers was likely a huge undertaking and a big risk. It’s not surprising that some things may have got broken in the process.
I do think that the beta testers for the Mk II probably did not pound the OS as thoroughly as they should have done. Although finding very good beta testers is an art unto itself.
i prefer the mkII by a factor of 10. love it.
there might have been a freeze after the machine was left on overnight, after some use the next day around 11am, not sure. Honestly the machine appears to be very stable in general.
oh btw, i noticed the 8 Recorder buffers actually do hold any recordings that were there before, if it is restarted, cool!
3 Likes
Actually this is a pretty new practice in hardware, and even in software (mostly games, it’s a lot easier to get away with it with a game than with a tool) releasing with bugs and let the early adopters essentially do the last round of beta testing really didn’t become standard until the last 10-15 years or so. There may have been one or two minor bugfix updates (often requiring physically swapping out an EPROM) in the life of a product 20 years ago but nothing like what we see today.
It’s a mixed bag though, on one hand companies are definitely cutting corners by essentially outsourcing beta testing to their customers, but on the other hand ti’s pretty easy to update firmware today and by doing it they get a much larger pool of beta testers that at least theoretically should be able to find more bugs faster, simply by brute force. I think it comes down to the size of the company for me. Elektron is still small enough that I think there’s some practical necessity to do it this way, but it wasn’t that long ago that a release as buggy as this (or the Digitakt or the OT MKI…) could have easily (and sometimes did) ruined a company this size and would have been a pretty serious problem for a much bigger company. In the case of Elektron, it’s unfortunate but forgivable because they’re a medium sized company who put out a lot of good, innovative instruments and have an earned reputation for good, long term support. When Akai or Pioneer does something like this it’s a lot less forgivable, and they should be called out on it by customers whenever possiblet. Smaller companies, not so much (as long as they stand by their products and get them working and have some transparency about it). Having customers is a privilege, not a right.
In Elektron’s case I’m not that worried because this seems to happen on half of their releases and they always make it more or less right in a more or less timely fashion. There are still a few minor things in the OT MKI that could be fixed up but overall, the fact that the firmware hasn’t been updated in two years is a GOOD thing, because it shouldn’t need to be.
What I’m saying is, no, releasing fully tested and working products is the baseline and releasing products with buggy firmware that (hopefully - I’m looking at you, Beatstep Pro) gets fixed quickly is a recent trend and it’s natural that people would expect the thing they just bought to work, because until recently that was a safe assumption to make.
EDIT: just to clarify, this is mostly directed at companies like Akai that have the resources to not need to follow this business model and just do it to cut costs (and in the case of the Akai/Alesis/Numark/Ion/Etc conglomerate, don’t really need to cut costs because the vast majority of their profits - at least according to people I’ve known who worked there - actually come from manufacturing electric blankets - one QA guy I knew there a few years back said that for a couple weeks they were actually making QA wear the new generation of electric blankets around while they did their normal work on the MPC Renaissance beta testing, so that they could test both at once and the company wouldn’t have to hire any new people), I think Elektron has a good track record as far as dealing with this stuff goes and unfortunately, even though it’s a shitty business model it’s also the standard now and for better or worse once you reach the scale that Elektron works on it’s probably hard to be competitive (we’ll ignore the question of whether being competitive is actually a good thing) without doing it.
1 Like
Yes I find more people need to communicate here a simple fact but very important, what’s bug or feature to make better need to arrived in Elektron hands … so im mean by ticket support.
because that’s the only way it became beneficial for every users…
@Simon : you should received some on this one
Maybe it’s not relative to every users…
I don’t have mine for now
2 Likes
I was originally one of the first on the list with Sweetwater for the preorder of the Octa MK2. I’ve very glad I cancelled it as I had planned on replacing my aging Macbook Pro and switching to more hardware based performance.
I own both an AR and A4 mk1 and I’m basically in love with them…but, I got them at least 1 year into production.
I can’t express how much I love those machines but they were not cheap. Had I bought the MK2 Octa and had freezes/crashes at my performances, I would probably not hold Elektron in such high regard. Any musician knows that “showstoppers” can cripple you when your starting out. I really hope Elektron decides to be above the fray and buckle down on their beta testing. I would be more than happy to help.
How does one apply for beta testing? Do you get a preproduction “loaner” to test on? That would be crazy fun!!!