Has anyone had any luck creating / editing startup images on macOS using anything other than Photoshop? What I thought would be a fun Saturday morning project has instead turned into what I can only describe as a rigmarole.
I’ve managed to download a working third-party image that I can successfully transfer to the SP as-is. But I don’t seem to have any apps capable of exporting a new image, or an edit of the working image, to a suitable monochrome format.
I’ve tried Affinity Photo (no BMP support at all), Preview, Pixelmator Pro and Acorn. PP and Acorn can seemingly export to suitable formats (e.g. 8-bit BMP, which Roland say is fine - neither can actually do 1-bit exports, as far as I’m aware), but I think the problem is ensuring the technical colour info/profile of the file is restricted to black & white. It looks black and white, but I suspect behind the scenes it isn’t. The exported file is always at least double the size of the working file.
My guess is I need something that explicitly supports 1-bit images. My next guess is that I’m going to end up messing around with Homebrew and ImageMagick, but I thought I’d ask if anyone had any bright ideas before going down that route.
Ding dong! Got a method working in a Python script using the Pillow library. I’ll tidy this up and make it available for anyone interested, unless someone comes up with a better idea in the meantime.
Well, I’ve got the startup images working fine with my script, which will do me, but instead of stopping there and being happy I decided to press on and make a screensaver. A few trial-and-error moments, but having eventually managed it… well, I assumed the 16 images would display as a slideshow, frame by frame, but instead it just appears to scroll through them from left to right, dropping down by a few pixels every loop (so even a nice looped scrolling background is ruined). Maybe it changes the routine every time it kicks in or something, but having put a fair amount of effort into creating a flickbook spectacular, I was DISGUSTED and started using the SP for sampling instead.
So basically, don’t pour your heart and soul into a screensaver for the SP is my advice.
I (stupidly) sold my SP-404 MKII to help finance my OP-1F (OP-1F is great but selling things you know you’re gonna buy again anyways is dumb) right before this update and decided to buy one again. Ordered from Guitar Center, it seems like I already have a tracking number so I might actually get it by this Friday. Pretty lucky if that’s true.
I’m really surprised by the step sequencer. I hope Roland will allow users to sequence the Rolls next but yeah, this update definitely shows where Roland wants to take this thing. I have little confidence for them as a company as they tend to not push out updates real quick and drop support much sooner than other companies but the way they are treating the 404 MKII seems a little unlike them lol.
My CCK arrived yesterday. Just went to hook up my iPhone to my SP… and I don’t have a USB-C to USB-A cable… I must have a 100 cables in this room but not that one. Fk cables and fk Apple.
Yeah it’s just weird to have a roll button but it’s almost useless in the way that people would expect it to work.
And yeah, the 404 is great I don’t know why I decided to sell that first lol. I sold a bunch of other gear recently too including an M8 at a significant profit so definitely have it covered. I just didn’t expect Roland to put out such a significant update so soon lol. But even then, it was in a good state on the last update just had quirks. I should have just kept it especially with a price increase happening lol.
Oh well. I’ll get my hands on it sooner or later again. Happy messing around with the OP-1F for now.
That pairing (OP-1F + SP-404MKII) sounds super fun, part of me almost sold all my stuff to rock that combo- as a self contained mobile power house, but I love my DIGITAKT and 303 too much to see them go.
It should be a great combo. Before the OP-1F was announced I would bring my OG-1 and MKII and sample the OP-1 into the MKII but with the vastly improved fidelity of the OP-1F I could see myself recording the MKII into the OP-1F.
Nice, I think foscuing on a looping scroll is the way forward for the screensavers. A Mario level would be nice, but as far as I can see it would drift down at the same time. Just an obscene chunk of text is probably the easiest soluton.
