The forum software is a bit of a pain to use, especially for responding to long posts, so forgive me if I missed a question…
Can I seamlessly migrate the pickup machine audio into another track via resampling, and then cut-up / mutilate the sample to my hearts content, freeing up the now redundant pickup machine to record new data (from my Eurorack, or whatever)?
If I understand this question properly, one solution is:
Track 1 - Pickup Machine
Track 2 - Flex Machine, with its Sample Slot set to Track 1 Recorder Buffer
Use Track 2 to slice audio in the recorder buffer and play back the slices. One interesting thing about this approach is that the sound of Track 2 changes as you continue sampling into Track 1. OTOH, if you want to clear the Track 1 buffer to sample something else, that will silence Track 2 as well.
Another solution:
Track 1 - Pickup Machine
Track 2 - Flex Machine with SRC set to output of Track 1 (instead of Track 1’s recorder buffer).
With this approach you sample once from Track 1 into Track 2.
I presume the pickup machines are effectively static, but resampling would allow me to get around that, yes?
I’m not sure what you mean by “static”. The Octatrack has a Static Machine, which is completely different from a Pickup Machine or a Flex Machine. Merlin’s document explains the differences.
Pickup Machines will let you layer loops easily - until you run into bugs. I have found Master pickup machines to be reasonably stable, but everyone including myself has had issues with Slave pickup machines.
Flex Machines can also layer loops but take more work. This thread has some instruction on how to use Flex for looping: