I recently purchased a Polyend Tracker plus and was so excited to have a tracker in a box.
It turned into a nightmare as I have never used a more unfinished buggy device in my entire life. The biggest issue was live recording and the way off commamds are handled. Samples would spread all over the place into multiple tracks, even midi tracks where samples don’t trigger. The off command is a nightmare making it impossible to record faster melodies in 16/1 timing.
I suggested they should take a leaf out of Renoise’s book by having an option to disable note off but to no avail. Anyway I am returning it for a refund.
I really wish Renoise would release a hardware tracker. That would be a dream come true, or even design and sell a chassis with buttons and a screen that accomodates a Raspberry Pi as it can run the linux version of Renoise.
POlyend has always been middle of the road , nice aesthetic but that’s where it stops.
A long history of bug infested machines and a promo machine fueled by influencers , and the occasional artist edition ( reall Y Bogdan ??)
Want a real good portable tracker , get the dirtywave m8
I feel polyend needs to finish their products before releasing any new ones. Using the tracker has felt like beta testing an unfinished product for a long time.
M8 is an excellent little gadget, but a real bastard to get hold of the new version. Hate having to wait for limited windows to maybe snag a pre-order slot which will then take months more to arrive. How do people put up with this kind of thing? It’s crazy. I guess everyone is used to it from buying all their Yeezy shoes and Supreme bricks. Can always pay a scalper €$£ for one I guess. I got a V1 second hand but the battery life wasn’t great so sold it.
Totally agree. It feels like a hack tech beta demo running on a project databoard like Teensy or a Raspberry Pi.
A lot of the users on the forums there don’t understand what im getting at. I explained the importance of being able to disable note off as it is impossoble to play anything more than 1/8 timing because note off comes directly after each recorded measure which acts as if you have played a note. I explained to be able to play 1/16 timing or appeggio at 100 bpm in a 64 measure pattern with note off, you would need to double the bpm to 200 and change the steps to 128. This is a modern device, not an old mod tracker trick to be able to play rolls and triplets. At least renoise creates an extra track within a track to accomodate note off on faster played notes.
I recorded a simple 4/4 monophonic kick drum pattern and it spread all the kicks over 9 tracks! Just pointless. A user siggested a work around where you have to unarm every track exept the one you are recording to to get around it, absolutely ridiculous. My idea of armed tracks to record to in a tracker is the one which is highlighted with the cursor lol.
The problem is I feel a lot of Polyend users are not realising the problem because they are using step based recording instead of live recording.
Such a shame, as it is a beautiful device, let down by awful bug ridden software.
Interesting, I didn’t know Polyend Tracker was so poorly done.
I imagine a lot of things would be solved if, for example, the following request were implemented well enough to allow Renoise to be controled with a Dirtywave M8-like control scheme.
After that, I think Renoise can become the most powerful tracker console without much man-hours by using existing products such as the ARM-based Game Boy-type, OS changeable Linux consoles, as there are probably many of them.
OG Polyend tracker (not “plus”) is built on Teensy 3.6 board. I have both - OG Polyend and M8 headless (this one uses teensy 4.2 - much more powerful). Tracker still is very buggy, sometimes unpredictible. You can work on your tune and after changing of patterns all patterns are gone empty for example. M8 is much more powerful and I can’t remember any critical or buggy behaviour of M8 headless (I`m shure, this is true for original M8 as well)
Bulkier then the handheld arm devices you speak off, but there is the pi400 which has a keyboard (although a bit crappy) and can run Renoise. Handy for a little nerding during vacation
saw this in the facebook polyend tracker users group;
" UPD FROM POLYEND TEAM
We’ve been listening closely to your conversations about firmware updates and other issues on the forum. We hear you, and we appreciate the feedback. We feel that our biggest failure here has been communication, we are a busy team but are making a commitment to improve this. I will be posting a quarterly update with what is going on at Polyend, but sharing dates and specific features in the works is unlikely. It was a mistake to preview the features that we were working on, as this created a lot of anticipation, and we have been overly focused on complex feature requests, instead of bug fixes.
Based on your input, we’ve already made some changes and have more planned for the future. Those one-on-one chats with some of you were incredibly helpful – thanks for taking the time to reach out! And I add this just because people may not realize it, since we don’t use it as a marketing thing - but this really is a small employee owned company, not a corporation trying to maximize profits for shareholders or vacant owners. Mistakes will be made, but we will work hard to not repeat them.
Here’s what’s happening now:
New Beta Firmware for Play & Play+: We released a new beta firmware that focuses on bug fixes for these devices (without the MIDI update for now) to get those fixes out to you faster. More fixes and features are on the way for both Play and Play+.
Upcoming Beta for Tracker Line: There’s a beta for Tracker, Tracker+, and Mini in the works to address the Live Recording issues. We hope to release it publicly soon.
About the Beta Program:
All these updates are currently in closed beta, but we are continuing to add new testers. We want to be more transparent with you, the community, so here’s the deal:
We review all beta applications and invite people in batches. Don’t worry if you don’t get in right away – we’ll be adding testers as needed.
You can apply here. (Heads up, if your posts have been flagged for moderation in the past few months, you may not be eligible at the moment.)
We are also currently discussing internally how we want to proceed with our approach to updates and firmware testing but we are not ready to share this with you as we are still formalizing how we want to do this in the future with more openness in mind.
I think more transparency is key moving forward as it may not be apparent to you all how passionate about these devices the Polyend team is, this isn’t a corporation with some suit at the top micro-managing and directing the creatives. Everyone is using these devices, with many of us using them as our primary instruments. I’m very proud to be part of this creative, enthusiastic, and inventive team and we want Backstage to be a place where you all can see this too. We want to create a positive space for you to share experiences, learn from each other, and enjoy making music with our instruments. We’re committed to continuous improvement, and we are sorry if we haven’t always met your expectations."
However I agree with the laptop sentiment. My Dad got a Polyend Tracker a couple years ago and while I thought it was OK for just dabbling / sketching, I honestly can’t understand why he wouldn’t just use that money on a small laptop or netbook instead and use Renoise.
