What’s wrong with simply publishing dev logs on their website?
This is a non-trivial feature, that’s why it takes a while to develop, especially as an afterthought.
Some people can’t save and load, for others it’s fine. They fixed related crashes in 1.0.1 and 1.0.4. And they are looking into that, as described above.
I want every single chase bliss, pladask electrisk, drolo and hologram pedal replicated as machines on the S-4, surely that’s not too much to ask.
Im considering buying the S-4 to combine with my OP1 Field and TX-6, how do you like it so far?
Let’s not involve Knut in this please. He is very considerate 
Can the S-4 be sequenced over USB MIDI, or does it have to be through the TRS MIDI ports?
Can it be sequenced by an iPad like any other regular synth? (Over USB would be cool).
Are the 4 tracks just MIDI channels 1-4?
a bit off topic, but i’m curious what you didn’t like about the gr-1 and why you wouldn’t go back to it after reading all that. cheers!
Does anyone know if there has been discussion with the Torso team regarding midi control of grain pitch (within the mosaic device)?
I noticed the usual suspects of scales that the grains can be quantized to, which is expected, but is also somewhat basic for a granular processor.
(I’m thinking of use cases of real-time grain pitch playback, similar in capability to devices such as Lemondrop, Tasty Chips GR-1, Delta Audio Spacecraft, Sugar Bytes Graindad, MI Clouds, Apesoft iPulsaret, the granular engine in Pigments, granular engine in Waldorf Iridium, etc, etc)
It has midi over USB as well.
You can set the tracks to response to whatever midi channel you want.
Thanks. Do you know if it can do MIDI over USB from Digitakt to S-4?
One of the devices has to a USB host for it to work.
Im not sure if any of the devices has USB host feature.
Digitakt has not, if im not mistaken
A bit more about how the granular capabilities in the S-4 are limited, in addition to the limitations of selecting grains from a buffer instead of the sample at the note pitch.
The maximum trigger rate of the S-4 is 50Hz in free mode, i.e. one sample every 20ms. Density in the GR-1 goes up to 1000 grains per second, i.e. 20 times that number.
So while both devices report a maximum on 128 grains per voice, there is a huge difference in two significant ways:
Also, with short grains the shape of the grain window has more influence on the sound, so the two additional parameters on the GR-1 has for the window give you a lot more flexibility sound wise.
Of course you can do nice things with longer grains, but for some people, dense short grains is where it’s at.
Now I never owned a Microcosm, so Io can’t really compare the S-4 to that, but from the videos I’ve watched it appears that the Microcosm also offers more density.
That being said, when you combine all devices and the modulators, you can get a lot out of the S-4, but the granular processing in itself is the most underwhelming of the devices.
There is nor reason why that should not change in the future, though, if Torso wants that to happen. The hardware platform of the S-4 (RasPi 4 or 5) is superior to that of the GR-1 (RasPi3), so in theory it could deliver more than the 1100 or so concurrent grains the GR-1 allows for (currently the S-4 can do “only” 512 concurrent grains), so I see no theoretical reason not to ramp up ramp up the trigger rate a notch or to. I’d like a “real” polyphonic granular sampler for the material device which bypasses the granular device, that might also solve it.
Does that mean something like the Tempera (which has a global stereo grain pool of 4096 grains that can be spread across 16 voices of polyphony, or all channeled into a single voice) is a more more capable granular device? or just more complicated with more options? II’m new to granular, so I’m trying to wrap my head around it all.
This sold me on the S4 and I was bracing myself to pay up for $700 for one.
Looks like I’ll have to wait. Seeing $900 now which is way out of reach. Is there a poor man’s S4 out there right now? Looking to use it for noise and ambient
When it comes to granular synthesis, the S4 can’t compete with the Tempera at all. S4 has a kind of granular effect… Tempera is a genuine monster of a granular synth.
Used mk1 octatrack can be had for less than $700usd. And it’s a rich man’s s4, at least currently.
Sure. You can do decent granular stuff with an iPad Air 2 using software that costs a few bucks, like iPulsare or iDensity, FLUSS, Borderlands or Quanta.
You can add Audiobus, Keystage, Ape Matrix, AUM, Camelot or similar to create a live-environment and add FX plugins etc. Roland has a few decent older class compliant interfaces that you can get for $20-30.
Recommended reading: SoS on granular synthesis
I would encourage you to play around with granular software first, so you can develop an idea what is does and what you need, things labelled “granular” are vastly different, as you can see from that discussion already.
If you own an iPad, that’s probably the cheapest entry point, see above for some recommendations. If you have M4L, use Granulator, and I think Bitwig’s sampler can also be of use.
iPulsaret and iDensity are also available for Mac at ~ $10, but most other granular soft I am aware of costs a lot more on Mac and PC, (see Crusher-X for example), so it might be too expensive for just getting a feel for it. Quanta also not exactly cheap, but is at least available on Mac as a trial version, that might also be sufficient.
Maybe someone else can recommend some decent free software.
I would beg to differ, especially as @_l’s intended use is "noise and ambient.
Here’s what the Octatrack doesn’t provide:
Also I know that a lot of people find the OT intimidating, which is certainly not the case with the S4, it is absolutely straightforward to use, you might need to look up how to set up modulators and how to change the mode of a knob, but that’s it.
Thank you for this huge list of recommendations, I’m going to explore the iPad option. Really appreciate it
The morphing resonator sounds beautiful.
Is there anything in Ableton or other software that is similar?
This is a great example of the how beautiful the morphing resonator sounds:
