I’m a complete beginner to this world of electronic music. A few weeks ago I got a couple of TE Pocket Operators, just to get a taste. I soon decided to give OP-Z a try. I was instantly hooked. Within a couple of days I was able to make simple music, and I was really enjoying the experience. I was amazed how this little device a size of a remote control was able to do so much, and do it all in real time. As a software engineer, it was also really appealing to get away from my computer and have some fun with a self-contained device to make music. Unfortunately, within a few days, I had already experienced three software bugs, two of which were pretty much showstoppers. This really infuriated me. I decided that it’s just a toy, in beta, and it will take them years before they iron out the bugs.
After doing some research, I decided to get my first Elektron, an Analog Rytm MKII. I thought, if it’s good enough for the pros, it’s good enough for me. So, I finally receive my AR, plug it in, and power up, and I see my first error message on the screen: Missing Cal: Pads. I was either going to throw it in the garbage and find a new hobby, or just ignore it. So I decided to ignore it and see what happens. I played with it for a few days, until yesterday when I experienced my first AR software bug, a really critical one too: the AR completely froze, and it froze while writing a Sound to the +Drive. Considering how much this device costs, and considering how long it’s been out, this kind of software bug is just unacceptable. I can’t even imagine what happens when the AR freezes because of a software bug while a “professional” is performing live. It’s such a joke, and it’s really sad.
Everytime you hear the words software bug, think software defect. Ever wonder why they call it a bug and not a defect? Because people wouldn’t be so willing to pay for something that has defects, so they call it a bug. Besides, it just sounds so cute. Software quality is going down every year, and good programmers are hard to come by. This is all by design. The business people want their engineers (employees) to be easily replaceable. As a result, this philosophy produces poorly trained programmers who are managed by non-technical people, the business people, through a process, such BS as scrum or agile. And at the same time, the consumers, the users, are conditioned to not only accept these kinds of defects, but also to get excited about the next software update.
At work our codebase is a pile of garbage, and there is nothing I can do about it. Business folks only care about deadlines. They will ship a product if it’s good enough. I think this is what happened with AR. If such a critical bug was triggered after only a few hours of use, there must be hundreds of them. I suppose this is a rant, so apologies for being not so constructive, but I don’t have the patience to jack with tech support, workarounds, or wait for the next patch to fix things.