So I’ve come across an undocumented limitation of the RK008, annoyingly right at the start of a live set on Saturday night.
I’ve been using it as a live midi looper with a combination of a nord drum 3 into itself and a linnstrument into digitone. Which was working a treat, but upon recording a new loop I got a message saying ‘Bummer Dude’ and it refused to save anything. Luckily I had a couple of practise runs saved on the device and I was able to get by for the set.
After contacting the developer, they mentioned the following: “The rk008 has the same memory structure as the MMT8 which is 64K. This also defines the way of recording. The MMT8 has 1 block of 64K, the rk008 has 16 blocks 64K each (the songs) but they can’t be used as one so if a song is full you need to select a new one to record in another section of 64K.”
I didn’t really have that much saved in it yet, I was up to part 5, but had only really fully used 2 parts. Just something to keep in mind if anyone like me was hoping it would be a perfect compact MPE sequencer. Not to say it’s not still useful, but will definitely be a lot more restrictive than the website indicates, which states “Each track can contain a complete multichannel song if you want.”
Obviously the linnstrument is going to have way more data than a standard midi song, but still it’s a bit of a letdown. Checking some of my midi collection, I have quite a large number >64K and very few <30K so you would probably need to be pretty conservative with your song composition as it is without factoring in MPE level data.