You pretty much summed it up. The last part about the Tracker being cheaper…I never have been able to figure that out. I guess I could just ask Polyend. Maybe they didn’t make a lot of profit on it but it got their foot in the door as far as the standalone devices area of the market (which in my opinion is quite saturated). And I guess materials and manufacturing costs went up just like everything else- going grocery shopping now is depressing- EVERYTHING has gone up in price. But I’m not going to instigate a discussion about how the middle class is being gutted right now; I’ll save that for another time and maybe another forum. Yeah I’m trying real hard to love the Play but then I look over at the Tracker and it’s like “hey, remember me? We had some really great, productive times together and I can do so much more for you.”
Yeah I remember from your posts (and very good music pieces) that you were one of the most fervent Tracker advocators ^^
Thanks! I really need to get back to making music with it and sharing. That was fun.
Don’t get me wrong the Play is fun to use and you can get something cool up and running very quickly, however the problem for most as it appears is when creating melodic tracks, basslines are fine, but it’s when trying to create things like, pads, soundscape, lead tracks which I have difficulty with, parts just don’t sound good or it’s difficult to create something musical, it doesn’t help that the keyboard on the Play is pants, why couldn’t they have used the whole of the 16×8 grid to be able to play notes in instead of the stupid side grid?
Yeah I get materials and things are more expensive but how come the Tracker hasn’t increased in price in that case? I don’t know, it just feels you get alot less features for more money with the Play.
I know it comes across as me shitting on the Play, but I do actually enjoy messing about with it, but as a standalone groovebox there are better all in one boxes, for me the Play excels in creating drum parts especially when using sample per step randomisation, there is nothing out there that does that to my knowledge.
Hmmm … does it have a (something)-controlled filter to add to the SCWFs and the envelope ? That would make it interesting to me.
Theres LFO/filter envelope settings on the instrument parameter page of the Tracker, if thats what you mean?
I’m getting this error on any new sample packs I have copied to the original micro SD card. Also, if I try to copy the original card included onto a new micro SD card, formatted correctly as FAT32, I get the error “folder already exists” whenever I try to load any sample pack - even original factory content. It’s been nothing but a nightmare trying to use this thing.
I found a solution, courtesy of Dean Daughters, who made an amazing series of Sample Packs. See solution below. It worked for me, but is Mac specific.
Here’s the solution:
1.) Plug in your SD card and open Terminal.
2.) Type “dot_clean /Volumes/MyDrive” (where MyDrive is the name of your SD card…it probably has defaulted to “Untitled.”
3.) Hit enter and wait a minute while it does its thing.
Also, I highly recommend Dean’s sample pack …
Hey, when I got mine the Tracker was 499 on Thomann and it is between 650 and 699 eur now (end of 2021 it was the first increase to 599 eur). So, I think there is a misconception or maybe you did not check the price recently but unfortunately it had been increased twice 
might have increased since initial release, but the Tracker is still $100 cheaper than Play on Polyend website, I stand by comments, Play is missing a number of key features which I hope Polyend add in next firmwares.
The randomize/chance of Play is limited to a range of pre-prepared sample packs (even if they are your own packs). This makes the results predictable. XLN XO can create more musical randomness of samples.
The performance mode is also less fun than the op-z punch-in effects.
I would use it again if Play had sampling and chopping. But the official polyend community seems to be adopting only minor modifications.
Thanks for your comments on the Play guys. Rather than flogging it, I decided to feed it some new samples, and spend some time with it. Came up with this today, which I’m fairly happy with:
Got a chance to borrow my friends Play for this past week. I think this is far closer to what people would claim is the Novation “Circuit Pro” then what the Deluge often is. Only because this feels more preset focused and more jam focused where Deluge is much more like a DAW workstation type thing.
I do find it easy to learn, though, some of the workflow things are kinda interesting, like having to select rows which took me awhile to figure out. I do think the idea that a sound is it’s own thing no matter the sample is pretty interesting. You’re not stuck with parameters to the sound like on a tracker where if you tweak the parameters of the instrument it’ll change that for every instance of that instrument (unless there’s some FX happening).
At the same time it’s so easy to mess up and select the wrong sound, though that’s also more of a thing I just have to learn to remember.
I do kinda wish there were more parameters I could manipulate. At the very least: why isn’t there at least one envelope and one lfo? That being said, there is something somewhat freeing about not really having to worry about sound design and it came be an easy way to simply focus on an arrangement instead.
I think the only thing I wish it could do seems to be what everyone wants it to do and that’s sequencer the perform effects. If that could be done and then you could export the stems with those perform effects baked in that would be so cool.
Other wise, yeah, it’s a weird device. On one hand there’s tons of interesting tools and sequencing options but on the other it does feel limited in lots of ways. I need to try it with other gear because I think honestly where this thing makes the price worth it is simply as a sequencer first and the groove box sample player second, but that’s just a guess.
I agree with your thoughts. I’m not actually missing the ability to sample or slice (obviously both would be welcome additions). Personally I’d like to see: lfo’s, envelopes, audio over usb, and more effects (phasers, flangers, tremolo, chorus etc).
At the moment, I do think it’s overpriced though and I just hope Polyend have some major updates waiting in the wings.
Polyend will be at NAMM, we can expect major updates 
I’m predicting:
- Recording performance fx
- Melody based pattern generation
- Update to sample library with new samples and new file/folder structure to support new features
- Sample editing with waveforms visible
- Save your own patterns for kick, etc.
- USB-C based sampling (unlikely, but one can dream)
- Some midi fixes
I want to like the Play. If it had the same features as the Tracker: sampling, LFOs, envelopes, radio, etc. the price would be valid or even reasonably more. I’ll never understand why companies keep dragging their hardware down with limitations that don’t make sense. If someone gets the Tracker to pair with the Play most will realize they don’t really need the Play anymore.
The Play offers a visual workflow with samples, but almost no sound shaping, no sampling, etc. it can’t be interpreted as a midi sequencing beast because of its limited midi ports.
Overall it’s a bit of a bummer. I’m keeping mine until the middle of the year to see if anything fruitful emerges.
Piotr from Polyend in his own words last week:
We are working on two very cool melodic-related features. But first, we’ll release a ‘midi update’ fixing some stuff there - coming very soon.
These features will be interesting. I think they’d benefit from a “pack creation” tool as well. What I mean is if you pull in samples from many libraries on your SD-CARD adding a function to create a pack.
I’m just really interested in the melodic features which it’s lacking it’s powerful as a drum machine.