Not many people realize that since OS 1.4 if you patch all of the outputs to the inputs (including MIDI) you unlock the Hexatrack. 16 track Overbridge, 8gb RAM, fully polyphonic sequencer, physical outputs for all audio tracks. Changed my life!
EDIT: I shouldn’t have skimmed the last 20-ish posts…
I went back and forth on buying an OT for about a year, I finally got it, and less than a month later the MKII was announced and some the major US retailers started blowing out their MKI stock for $800. I kind of regret not being more indecisive, I could have got the same Octatrack I have now and had almost $500 left over to get something else.
You never taped your favorite songs on the radio so you could listen at leisure? It felt like waiting in the shrubs to take a photo of an albino squirrel or something…
Out of curiosity, how do we know that the Digitakt has nearly reached its limits ?
There was an Elektronauts challenge years ago where I ended up sampling “My Pal Foot Foot”. Can’t remember if that was part of the challenge or not but it likely was one of my first OT adventures come to think of it.
Wonder if I’ve still got the recording somewhere…
Edit: Jesus, my effort is worst than I remember 
possibly the only thing musically worse than The Shaggs
But, the point being, what fun you can have with an Octatrack!
Fx Suite on par with Eventide H9 or Virus TI
Additional Inputs, for a total of 4 Stereo Pairs
Expanded mixer UI to accommodate 8 inputs
Modern screen and UI like the Digis
Overbridge, for sending tracks and managing/setting up samples, projects & patterns
Able to use MIDI CC with crossfader in scenes
MIDI slides
MIDI CC quick menu/presets for your synths
More internal RAM
The older I get the more I think the later Shaggs stuff is the best.
Let it be an Thunderbolt Audio Interface in itself.
Definitely. If you want to tame that crunch and add warmth, record your CD to a tape, then record it with 96Khz for best results…
This is coming from someone that has never owned an OT but has been playing with OTs that belong to friends, stores etc. over the years.
Would love to see overbridge, really good converters, more I/O (so you can create a FX loop with more I/O to spare) and basically just everything the OT can do now but better. I think if the OT(2?) can do all that with about a <400$ price increase it will give so many current devices a run for their money.
I want this too - I suspect they had to limit this due to bandwidth limitations - i.e. if you had all 8 MIDI tracks going with a bunch of CC’s in scenes then moving the crossfader might overload the connection in some way? I wouldn’t have expected it to be an internal processing limitation, but maybe I’m wrong.
Edit: From some quick Googling seems you might be limited to around 1000 messages per second with MIDI - with a crossfader moving through 127 steps that would mean you’d only need 1 CC value on each track to exceed that limit with any crossfader play quicker than a second. Seems a bit lower than I’d have expected, maybe that’s per channel - or just wrong, but hey this is the internet.
What about the 24 midi lfos ? 
At least with current OT the possibility to assign lfo’s depth to scenes would be great.
I don’t think that could be the case because midi controller keyboards exist and there’s no problems with multiple assigned faders.
But even if, I’d be good with one midi cc per scene. You could do a decent amount on any synth by sending to modwheel as a destination
But even if you use all 10 fingers on a keyboard that’s only a couple dozen messages to send (at what ever speed you can play) - not that much data. Same with physical faders - you’d have to be using them all at once, to send multiple CC’s for it to even get close to what an OT crossfader is doing. I can’t think of an analogy that uses the kind of bandwidth we’d be looking at - it’s the potential equivelent of you using more like 64 faders, all at once, really fast.
That’s a fraction of what happens with an OT slider.
Which is likely where all the bandwidth is assigned now you mention it. Even if they allow CC control on the crossfader, it would need to be limited way below the number of CC’s available - and it might mean losing LFO’s - it would become a thing to manage.
Edit: Something written by someone smarter than me:
MIDI has a Baud rate of 31250; at optimum this is 31250 bits per second. A MIDI byte is 8 bits plus a start and stop bit, and each MIDI message is three bytes, which gives a total of 30 bits per message.
This means that under optimal conditions, a maximum of 1042 messages per second can be obtained via the MIDI protocol. In reality you would get significantly less, but then I’m a pessimist.
Every note action consists of a note on and a note off; that gives you 521 notes per second flat-out, not taking into account outside factors like jitter and target-device buffer delay. Well, at least the note velocity data is encapsulated within the note-on and note-off messages, so it comes at ‘zero-cost’.
A key restriction on the MIDI Baud rate is the use of opto-isolators in the MIDI hardware transport common to all MIDI-equipped devices. This makes it impossible to ‘hack’ the protocol to obtain greater throughput.
1000 per second is way higher tan I expected, actually. MIDI bandwidh is very low.
Anyway, it’s a slow serial protocol so you’d have insane amounts of latency long before you hit that cap. That’s one fo the reasons professional sequencers usually had between 2 and 4 physical MIDI outputs. Part of it is being able to go beyond 16 channels but the other major reason is that if you chain all of your gear from a single output you run into the limitations of MIDI bandwidth quickly. If you try to do an even moderately complex arrangement with a decent amount of CC data on a single MIDI port you’ll start hearing the delay between “simultaneous” notes. Ssimultaneous notes aren’t actually possible with MIDI - if you play, say, a chord the notes are played one after the other quickly enough that it sounds like they’re being played at the same time, but if you are doing a realistic orchestral arrangement or some thing, where you have dozens of notes playing at the same time with a lot of CC, you start to actually hear the timing of the notes spread out more and more because there isn’t bandwidth to send all of that data fast enough to make it sound like it’s happening at the same time. By the 90s, the MIDI protocol was pretty obsolete but it was already such an established standard that the only way to get around that was
I can exclusively reveal it will be called the Octatrack Field and will be basically identical, but cost $10,000.
Will the LEDs be more Earth-toned?
Agreed. An Octatrack 2, with Overbridge, updated audio and minor UI updates would take over.
What I meant is that if you use a few midi lfos at full speed, plus midi clock, you can easily reach max bandwidth.
The thing is that people would possibly complain about a “buggy” behavior with crossfader because of bandwidth limitation, but it would be technically possible (not using much lfos at the same time).
Btw it is pretty easy to use a midi processor to assign crossfader CC48 to other CCs. I also did it with ZOIA, with min/max values (CC48 crossfader mapped to any midi parameter).