To add to what others already said, this video (I hope I got the right one) is a good explanation of how a workflow with unsynced loops can work:
This one for the SP404 is also still relevant:
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Happy Friday part 2. Testing out the OneShot workflow on Patterns and changed my Pattern Switch to SX in Settings and boy howdy do i love this little box even more:
I wish all OneShots worked this way on a Step Sequencer.
Learned a ton from this video:
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What lovely LP furniture, where did you get those?
Thanks, ordered!
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Any TRS 1/8 inch (3.5mm) audio cable works for TRS midi, if both devices have mini midi connectors. Itās exactly the same cable type.
Edit: of course there is the TRS-A and B midi standard. But the overwhelming majority use TRS-A these days. Especially if they are from the same manufacturer. And all it means is that B and A have the ring and tip of the connector swapped.
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The only issue with this update is I now kind of want to have two SP404s!!! One at the start of my chain and one at the end for all the FXā¦ anyone else rocking dual SPs!?!
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Thatās a great tutorial. 
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That was the first thing I tried, sadly not!
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Lost my ability to think today but i have this turntable that has no built in amplification and has an āearthā cable. Would i need an RIAA amlifier to sample to the sp-404mk2 if i would get one?
bug or design with the sound generator?
with ENV currently broken (still assuming here but seems so) iāve been using the CTR3 pot while looping for volume variations and hand made envelopes.
If you start from 0 and raise up, the pads donāt trigger, you seemingly need to start from at least 1 for a trigger then have volume control during recording.
reckon thatās right or wrong?
also do you think itās unreasonable to wish for a poly mode for the sound generator?
i appreciate itās more for creating source sounds to then sample, where all our envelopes and FX sound design wishes come true, but itās just too fun and tempting as a quick performance synth 
also its really nicely understated that the mark button becomes a toggle between between the last open page and the looper page whilst looping.
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you would need something to boost the phono signal to line level, although you could try putting one channel into the front mic input with an RCA -> 1/4" adapter and crank the gainā¦ it will probably be noisy!
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For now, using skipback recording with sound generator seems like the better choice. Exporting doesnāt seem to play nicelyā¦ and quite often leaves weird oscillator artifacts that you can see if you zoom in on the start of the sample.
I feel like I can notice a minor difference with envelopes when you are playing the oscillator live, and you can check skipback and see it is in fact making a cycle or two difference on the attack and/or decay depending on the settingā¦ but otherwise the oscillator is full on sustain, so itās very hard to actually hear or observe the differenceā¦ exporting to a sample is anybodyās guessā¦ and Iāve definitely gotten it into a bug where you try and export, it does the thingā¦ and then you have an empty padā¦ why shrugā¦ but skipback is there to save the dayā¦
Iāll also mention that Level and Pan have some really bad artifacts if you play them realtime, and you can see that while the overall oscillator is stable by checking in skipback, for whatever reason you can see the oscillator glitches when it appears to processes the level or pan changes. I was hoping it was something that we could hear but wouldnāt hit skipback, but if you check the buffer itās thereā¦
Last observationā¦ and will need to go back to an older firmware to see if it was there and I didnāt noticeā¦ but while playing with the sound generator exports, I applied an attack envelope to the sample, and for whatever reason you can hear added tone/timbre to the pad while the envelope activates. Itās weird, and I didnāt notice beforeā¦ but Iām also not typically using pure sine wavesā¦
Anywaysā¦ still happy with the update, but definitely parts that seem to beā¦ funky for whatever reason.
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Just having so much fun just looping guitar and making beats, everything is so much easier with the update. Sucks about the import file thing, but then I just feed it samples via type c. Need to get bigger sd card now and some midi cables so I can synch it with my other stuff
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yeah, the exported SG loops arenāt always watertight yet for mono/polyphonic chrom playback, noticed some artefacts too.
iād doubt theyād have multiple env settings for undetectable cycle length envelopes (would they?!) and suspect a new fw ironing out expected bugs from such a huge upgrade will be released soon enough.
on the plus itās not really stated out loud, but when playing longer loops CTRL1 on the looper cycles the current playing bar when set to 1 and picks up where left off when returning to 2/4 etc. this is nice.
more CC wishes include some Sound Generator EXT control, duty cycle modulation would be cool. but keep reminding myself to draw a line between basic waveform generator and performance synth.
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Sound generator
I, too, am finding the save to sample glitchly. Some is the change in sound is do with importing to a sample- then it is effected by start and stop points and particularly the loop location-sometime the loop will fine with a pure sine wave ringing out and sometimes it be very glitchly and rough. This might good in the future for random sound design purposes. Envelope helps but I soon wish for a ADSR envelope.
The bug with exporting to sample seems to happen with very short samples. Short samples also seem to be beyond the envelopes which do seem to freeze/not allow adjustment. Maybe the machine really cannot handle single cycle waveforms yet.
Thanks for the tip to take the clean sounds from skipback.
I think a lot of this is confusion of what āenvelopeā means on the scale of a wave generator. This means an envelope on the cycle level, not on the ānumber of secondsā level we typically mean when we think synths.
So, for example, this is what a 64Hz sine looks like with no ENV:
And this is with ENV A2 (which applies an envelope to the first cycle of a wave):
Note that this is not time dependent. If I generate a sine at 1046Hz and zoom in, itās still applying the same env on just the first cycle, despite that cycle being just a fraction of the length of a 64Hz one:
The env in the sound generator seems to be there as a click/pop prevention mechanism not a sound design tool.
EDIT: Before this insinuated envelope was applied on the beginning and ends of generated waves. This isnāt the case. Just the beginning. Thanks @waftlord!
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nice can you visualise them all!?, for RESEARCH purposes.
imagining C2 would extend over the first 6 cycles then?
in the roland vid the spoken reference to the ENV is just for attack, need more input.
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EDIT: Ah ha! I do see wonky starts when exporting a length in periods instead of seconds. Thatās extra strange as youād expect specifying a number of periods would be more exact. Though as @music-cabin points out, short sample-count cycles have always been an issue on the 404. Maybe related?
Iām not seeing this. Are you sure this isnāt an env doing something to the first few cycles?
For example, If I set up a sine, saw, or tri wave at 440Hz, no env, export each (by pressing rec) a bunch of times, and zoom to the start of each they look perfect to me and are each identical with each other in the 404 editor.
Exporting and bringing them into a DAW where I can zoom to the sample-level also looks pretty much perfect?
Am I doing something different? Or maybe misunderstanding?
maybe weāre (me certainly) are incorrectly hyped about the idea that it should be able to create a flawless single cycle loop for playback in chromatic mode with the amp envelope.
currently when i export the start point of the cycle isnāt necessarily on 0, and can click.
not sure if this is dependent on cycle length/freq etc. perhaps this is why the envelopes are therein the first place, but iām researching now.
i think i may have naively thought it could be a one press deal, set wave, set freq, set period cycles, hit rec. boom, instant looped tone. but may still require a bit of user editing for this.
classic moment of trying to find out the mk2 method to repeat a process consistently.