This is the most logical reading of the situation I have read in days.
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Look, we canāt expect everyone to understand the rules of engagement regarding releases and development. Anyone who just bought the Digitakt on day one to make good music, canāt be expected to understand and accept that it crashes and misbehaves by the hour.
There should be no knowledge or understanding required from the customer side of things, on the hardships of development to appreciate a productās worth. Elektron is currently selling an instrument that doesnāt do what it says it should do. Weāre okay with that and weāre helping out, but we canāt normalize this. Thereās a world outside Elektronauts and I just donāt think most of the people go āOh, itās all right I guess, this was to be expectedā when the machine crashes for the third time in an evening. Especially when you go to Elektronās site and find no explanation.
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I think this once, itās okay. Weāre part of Elektronās growing pains and weāll contribute to help rather than slam them for a mishandled release.
But I also think thereās a point in saying that when you ask someone for 600-700$ and give them a product in return, the general conception is that this product should work as you say it will at the time of purchase, not a couple of weeks after.
And a little communication to set the record straight never hurt anyone, whereas the opposite silent approach is generally known to cause some damage.
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I used mine a fair bit today with no crashes.
Iām only using internal sequencing but I did hook up and configure a bcr2000 controller .
Digitakt sent out ccās that bcr could learn and it seemed ok
Nice to have mute , solo , fx sends easy access
Can also tweak delay feedback until it starts feedbacking on itself , tweak the filter and press encoder to default to a normal feedback position
I tried using krft on iPad as controller but itās a little buggy too.
I cancelled my preorder today.
Appreciate everyone in those threads showing us they current state of the machine.
Iām not paying close $600 for participating in beta.
Iām most likely gonna go with Live. Yeah buggy but at least you can use it. I need a sampler and not sure about OT at this point.
maybe there are some midi issues
butā¦ I dont have the feeling I am beta testing
its just a lovely machine
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I absolutely love mine. Itās already amazing and itās going to be a beast when they are done.
I made my first track with pattern chaining yesterday and it worked like a charm. Saving patterns would be nice, but Iām beginning to see their logic for not including it. The way it is now, it forces you to perform your tracks and it lends itself to on the fly remixing rather than just pressing play and sitting back. Itās a totally different way of working for me, but Iām liking the results so far!
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FYI iām not talking about a mk 2 of the DT, iām talking about hardware revisions which usually arenāt announced. They just fix things in later batches. There were 9 revisions of the TR-808 for example, but nothing looks different on the outside. They will likely be changes based on warranty issues in the first batches.
These days with digital the changes lean more toward firmware, but i also want to wait for the firmware to get mature too.
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Tempest OS is still being developed. Better yet, the current Beta is incredibly stable. No major bugs anymore.
But yeah, at release it was a disaster. Itās just how small companies work, and they probably need to, to keep going. Sometimes it results in a disaster release. Iām not sure thereās another way though. They probably canāt afford to delay releases.
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DSI officially announced it as done: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2017/03/13/dave-smith-instruments-tempest-no-longer-being-updated/
What makes you say itās now back in development? Do you have a source?
I know there was recently a user petition to get DSI developing for it again, did that work?
Got to agree the OT is amazing. I am new to both machines, and it shows how awesome the OT is as even though itās a 5/6? Year old machine The excitement and downright joy of it leaves me feeling underwhelmed with DT.
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with a few other users, we created that petition.
it worked.
Yes, that message has been weird because on the official DSI forums there was an outcry about it. And rightfully so.
Since then theyāve still been working on finalizing the OS, removing major bugs. Thereās just no new features being added. The newest beta can be found on the official DSI forum. I expect the final release to be this year. I own a T myself and have this latest beta installed.
Major bugs are now gone and the T runs as stable as ever. A few minor bugs remain, but nothing you canāt workaround.
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I think they release products to soon.
Maybe this is to keep up with the competition. A tight budget , so no good testing.
And, not to forget, they have to make a living.
In the end we as customers have to pay the bill. You buy a buggy product and hope that they will solve it.
And when not, youāve still got a box with issues, but they still have your money.
Deal with it.
Thatās why I am always careful to buy these new toys, unless the brand has a very positive reputation.
I donāt mind teething bugs so much, if a company is forced to release early for money reasons or whatever then fair enough, everyone takes the ride together. Just the kind of āitās news to usā way they went about it. They should have disclosed all known bug info and allowed people to make an educated purchase decision. Thatās the sour partā¦
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And then thereās thisā¦
Jonas Hillman (CEO/owner Elektron):
āfor this year it is only the beginning, we will start launching more products than you will ever believeā.
doesnāt bode wellā¦ā¦
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Iām quite excited by the prospect of more boxes but then I have a Digitakt that is working fine and not crashed once yet.
The bit I worry about is O/S development. Native Instruments, for example, from my understanding have quite a small development team that finds it difficult to keep pace and introduce some things they have promised (particularly when it comes to Maschine). If a company of NIās scale struggles badly then how will Elektron fare?
Iām sure Elektron will have considered all of this when any decision to ramp up releases was taken though.
Interesting that the heat launch was far smoother, less complex box possibly but hardly any bugs reported.
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I was just wondering how unusual is it that a product would be released with such buggy software? Is it unheard of with the larger companies superior software testing protocol, or is it fairly common that new devices have some bugs to work out after release? In my limited experience Iāve never encountered a software crash on a Roland.
I know DSI is a smaller company has had a lot of bug issues with their products, the tempest for instance was a disaster at release, and after 5 years of seldom updates they finally stopped updating it, leaving it with various bugs forever. I personally had major issues with their mopho software upon release that rendered the unit unusable, as a working producer back then I didnāt have time to wait for them to develop it, I had to return it after a week and get something I could use. Due to these factors Iāll never buy a DSI instrument again.
I remember dealing with several octatrack bugs several years after it was released, and certain bugs that still persisted until I sold it back in 2014. Has electron abandoned development on this software? Or were the bugs finally squashed? My A4 had a handful of serious bugs for the entire year I owned it.
Iām not without patience, my worry is that elektron might not have the time and resources to iron out all the digitakt bugs before they get bored of working on it, or shift their focus to a newer product, they seem to releasing them faster and faster.
What is reasonable to expect as a customer, what do you guys feel about elektrons track record in this matter? Now I know elektron makes niche products, and you canāt get stuff like this from Roland, but just from a software stability perspective how do you feel it measures up to the larger companies? Is it electronās limited resources that lead to buggy releases? Or is it their products complexity?
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