exactly, we dont know anything about it and some have the OG, imagine how a new customer feels…at least put a up a manual…
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I’m definitely not up in arms at all. In fact, in all my comments I’ve maintained my love for the Tracker. All I’m saying is take what all these companies say with a grain of salt. I’m good with whatever they want to do. Just making an observation.
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must say I love the size of it.
tho near the end of that vid, the extended reach he does with his right index finger doesn’t fill me with UI confidence.
looking forward to seeing more real world stuff.
Nothing wrong with this! Can imagine this ticks all boxes for you. Actually, I also like the idea of it.
However, Polyend has built up a bit of a reputation in regards to product support, transparency and overall communication with users. There seems to be a lack of respect at times.
My biggest gripe is how they handled the Tracker firmware. It took ages to become decent and a majority of suggestions on GitHub got ignored… some users gave great suggestions and what we got back was a way to view the pattern horizontally and NES emulation.
Also them revealing the 1.7 update for the OG Tracker after the backlash gives me a feeling it wasn’t planned at first, but they needed to respond.
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personally, i have never owned an officially released, full production product that was as broken as the OG tracker, and stayed broken throughout multiple updates. and yes, i liked the tracker. but that consumer experience has permanently tainted my image of PE as a whole. im sure plenty of people share this sentiment.
its a horrible trend in everything these days, over sell an idea without a fully functioning product.
hell, they would have a better moral standpoint as a company in my perspective if they were asking for these projects to be backed on kickstarter or something, because the OG tracker clearly wasnt ready for full on production. they are operating at the quality level of that sphere but asking for preorders like theyre EA
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Yeah, not saying there aren’t plenty of plain old haters around, but lots of us feel burned by Polyend’s previous releases that carried a lot of promise but massively underdelivered. Their Youtube/influencer footprint and often poor customer service add fuel to the fire. I still really want them to pull it off because they have great ideas.
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I’m not bashing Polyend here but they do behave oddly at times. Like they have a Legacy page on their site and list the original Tracker there. Now, they explain why but this is the Internet and folks jump all over shit like that.
I always thought the OG revisions (3 of them I think?) all in no time at all was odd too. It’s normal to evolve and tweak products a bit but I’ dunno, the way they went about this or how they responded to some on the jog wheel was a bit iffy.
Even the launch of the Mini feels a little botched in my opinion.
Having said that, I do think folks are super cynical and negative towards them. I guess that’s just how the folks on Internet lives and breathes these days.
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First, the word backlash implies some sort of wrongdoing on Polyend’s part, which I don’t think announcing a mini version of an existing product counts as. More like a bunch of people started whingeing and talking shit about their company on the internet.
Of course they rushed together a statement about 1.7 quicker than they’d have liked, half the internet was (baselessly) accusing them of abandoning the OG Tracker.
It’s all the internet warriors causing this problem. If Polyend don’t respond, they’re not being transparent and if they do respond, they’re still criticised. They’re being served up a massive shit sandwich.
The Tracker has had a lot of updates and yeah, there were/are some bugs, but a lot of people seem to be spitting out their dummies because the features they want haven’t been added yet (song mode much?). Seems to be this attitude on the internet where we the consumer get to chat as much shit about companies as we like, but they’re expected to stick to whatever expectations we decide to impose on them and smile like a good doggy. Fuck that. I kinda respect them for throwing a bit of shade back from time to time.
They’re a small company trying to make interesting products. Yeah, they’re a bit dry when people give them shit, but I’d be a lot fucking dryer if I was in their position, and so would everyone else.
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This is false.
They had already committed to a new Tracker firmware before the Mini was even announced.
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Perhaps, and I know that’s a lot to ask, but perhaps they could hire someone to write proper manuals. Those are pretty terrible, incomplete and badly structured, not to mention HTML only (at least in PT’s case).
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Not here to defecate on a brand you like. Just pointed out something that looked odd to me.
If this update was indeed already planned I would assume they would have communicated it before.
Improved headroom, fx and midi is a big deal. But initially it seemed to me like those additions were only on the mini.
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Personally, I don’t think they thought this through (again). Mini Tracker, sure, awesome, but why not scrap the OG at the same time and improve on it with a MKII so the features are the same on both? Leaving just layout/size differences to decide between. No way many people are going to touch the OG now knowing that it’s inferior to the Mini.
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what about the one expectation of producing stable, working products? that is the most important and reasonable expectation to have for a company, and when they flat out ignore that, its not just cheeky. its bad business.
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They announced the OG Tracker was getting an update during demos of the mini at NAMM. It wasn’t in response to any backlash. Yes, they probably could have announced it well before NAMM but folks are making a bigger deal out of this than I think it warrants.
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I mean I bought the OG Tracker and thought it was just fine. Didn’t run into any bugs or show stopping omissions.
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myself and many reporters on github had very different experiences. we certainly arent just creating these bug reports from our imaginations
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Yep, lucky to get a response
They talked about it before the Mini was announced. Polyend had YouTube videos about the Tracker and stated that more updates were coming.
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Which ones? Would be curious to see