Congratulations!
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That delivery date is total guesswork on Thomann’s part, imo. Other stores have it down as anything from 25 January to 3 March 
(But yes, congrats, it’s coming soon and I hope you love it!)
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That’s a beaut
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Actually not finding it too difficult to get my head around after watching a few videos, it makes sense. I think the issue is, you need to know what you want to achieve with it before you start configuring it. It’s pretty modular in its config which makes it pretty unique, it’s a mixer, it’s a sampler, it’s a looper, it’s an FX unit, it’s a Sequencer…it’s all of them…all together at the same time!
wonderfully bonkers. I’d love to know more about its development cycle, how the OT was realised and came about. Sounds like a very creative software developer went to town on it and scope creep went exponential (in a good way), hence how deep/complex it is. Does anyone know the history of the unit well, any OT developer interviews. I heard the OT Developer left Elektron, wonder where they went?
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I was a beta tester for the OT, a few more forum members still active were too, it was a very different machine at the start, no midi sequencer, no pickup machines, less fx, no slice number modulation, but even back then it was still very capable.
The developer did not leave, in fact the OT is developed by a team:
Oscar Albinsson, Magnus Forsell, Anders Gärder, Jimmy Myhrman, Jon Mårtensson, David Revelj, Daniel Troberg.
Daniel Troberg left, he now works for Ashun Sound Machines, AFAIK he is the only one who left, and from what I know he wasn’t a dev but definitely a big part of the OT, as they all are.
That is about as much as I know, I believe that Oscar is the dsp guy from previous postings by Elektron employees, but it has always been said that the OT is very much a team effort.
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Previously on Elektronauts:
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I just got my first Octatrack recently, and had the option to order the black one. The gray one took over a month to get to me, can’t imagine how long the black one would’ve been. Im in Canada for context, I’ve been told by the salesguy at Long and McQuade that their distribution center has had long waits on orders this past year.
All that being said, the new black units across the Elektron line are pretty sick looking, congratulations!
Currently I have a stereo sub out from my mixer running into inputs CD. For the last several weeks I’ve been recording guitar loops into a Line 6 Helix, then I send the Helix through mixer into Octatrack. Then I sample these pieces into the Octatrack for mangling. This final creation gets processed into DAW. Then I go back over this layer with other voices from my studio like Hydrasynth, Digitone, Lyra 8 etc…
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Keep an eye on Moog Audio’s website. Sometimes they show stock.
Good to have or have had a Machinedrum UW to understand OT history easily.
OT MKI manual
When we developed the Machinedrum UW, one of the goals was to allow for a creative use of samples. Once the machine was released it became apparent that especially the RAM machines, which made it possible to record sounds in real-time and instantly play them back, were utilized in ways we originally couldn’t even imagine. Users around the world used them to incorporate live sampled shortwave radio sounds in their compositions, make instant remixes of 12” records and to more or less conceive new genres of music. It was obvious that the RAM machine concept harbored a tremendous potential. This was the starting point of the Octatrack. We wanted to create a machine that would regard recorded material not as inflexible sounds, but rather as something highly malleable. This is one of the reasons why the Octatrack exists. The other one is because of the stage. The laptop computer has quickly established itself as a common instrument in live setups. It is a powerful and highly customizable tool, however, the multi functionality is at the same time a disadvantage. When it comes to audio related tasks a laptop is still a jack of all trades but master of none. The Octatrack on the other hand is designed to be a streamlined, reliable and straightforward machine allowing live performers to really add something extra to their sets. It can act as a backing track machine, a second turntable, a source of experimental soundscapes or simply as an instrument encouraging improvisation and fun. These two reasons converge and form the ultimate raison d’être of the Octatrack: its capability to re-establish sampling as an art form. We hope it will be a trusty companion during your musical endeavours.
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I’m a coder and I can see how and FPGA could be useful for a sampler. As a matter of fact I build a simple sampler in vhdl code myself during my university years just for the hell of it 
An FPGA is basically a digital circuit laboratory on chip. It contains a lot of logic components, logic gates and such, and a switchmatrix that lets you program how all these logic components connect to each other, hence Field Programmable (logic)Gate Array. So it allows you to design an actual digital circuit in a hardware description language such as vhdl, and then program that circuit onto the FPGA chip and the chip becomes that circuit. It can be programmed to become any sort of digital circuit, for example you could program it to be RAM, you can even implement a microprocessor design on an FPGA.
So it allows the programmer to make highly specialized dedicated digital circuits that can be optimized for virtually any task. And there is plenty of room on chip for having many many dedicated circuit designs and you can have them all execute their respective tasks in parallel so everything executes simultaneously. When we do parallel processing on a regular microprocessor, it’s actually not parallel most of the time, rather it’s sequential but emulating parallel using some sophisticated scheduling algorithms. Excpet ofcourse with multicore processing, but then you are still limited to just a few cores. This means that an FPGA is an absolute killer when it comes to parallel processing, because of the largely parallel nature of the chip it can do such tasks much much faster than a regular microprocessor.
I’m not sure what they use the FPGA for in the octatrack, but if they are using it for implementing specialized digital circuit design, for example for digital signal processing and such, then having that onboard FPGA would allow the Elektron team to reprogramme and change the actual digital circuitry implemented on the FPGA chip when firmwareupdating for instance. They could add new powerful features and implement new dedicated digital circuits dedicated for these features on the FPGA.
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Your post was packed with interesting information. I don’t know much at all about FPGAs, but it sounds fascinating.
So, is it fair to say the HDL tells the FPGA “what to be”? In other words, the FPGA is super flexible and can be lots of different kinds of circuits, but the HDL tells it “be this kind of circuit”?
And if that’s the case, does that mean that you would program the DSP on a higher level, “over” the HDL, perhaps in another language like C++, Rust, or whatever? Or can you actually program DSP in HDL?
The FPGA is like a huge box of simple LEGO bricks while HDL is used to specify the layout plan (how all the"bricks" should be connected).
At its core you are not really “programming” a FPGA (in the meaning of sequential programming). You are creating layouts of digital circuits. So the required skill set is very different from the skill set of a standard software engineer.
But of course, there are tools which let you specify your layouts in programming languages like C/C++ (kind of cross compiling to HDL). Nevertheless you really need to know what’s going on “under the hood”. Otherwise the cross compiled layouts are just abhorrent bad …
For a quick primer into various topics related to FPGAs see (for example):
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Totally. I write code all day at work, but it ultimately runs on x86_64 chips (regular computers), mostly virtualized in cloud computing environments. I never get so close to the hardware and definitely never get the flexibility of something like an FPGA.
Is that the standard way to program DSP on an FPGA? Or is that just something that’s also possible? I guess I’m wondering if there’s a level of abstraction over the HDL where one programs DSP – in other words, can you write HDL to tell the FPGA what kind of circuit to be, and then on top of that compile high level code (like C++) to be like, say, an oscillator? Or is the HDL programming where it ends?
I’m still waiting for FPAA to mature enough that it’s practical and starts getting used in real-world instruments instead of just proof of concept stuff.
It is used in many real-world applications. There is an FPGA in the octatrack for instance 
You can’t programme an FPGA in C++ or Rust directly. It is programmed in hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog. There is not much abstraction with FPGAs, it’s pretty much as near to hardware as you can get without grabbing a soldering iron to solder all your components together. But, like I mentioned, you can implement a microcontroller design on an FPGA, in fact there already exists the MicroBlaze Core which has been designed specifically to run on Xilinx FPGAs. And you can programme the microblaze core in C++ 
Got it. I think was thinking of an FPGA more like a “chip” and HDL like “assembly language”, but that’s not quite it, unless maybe you use that microcontroller design. Thanks for all the info
Op-1 field came after Usb audio op-1 update