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.
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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.
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What about PolyendPlay ?
Same problems as PolyendTracker ?
By not putting up with it. I’ve been interested in it but that wait time kills the interest dead.
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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.
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I waited 4 years for a cirklon , so a couple of months waiting time isn’t that hard (for me )
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)
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It’s a nice NES emulator and radio! The music tracker is optional
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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 
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I just want to share my GPD win 2 with Renoise on it picture
It’s better than I thought it would be but still it’s much much easier just to use a laptop (any laptop is a Renoise Hardware basically)
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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:
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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+.
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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:
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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.
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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.)
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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."
That’s a nifty wee device.
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.
I think ios and android version is a blast for the music scene! Thats all we|you need for portable Tracking.
And Buy Renoise - To support!!!
Renoise is already the God of Daws
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Hate when companies write a big instagram emo post to apologise for being rubbish. They always emphasise how human they are and how its a labour of love, small team, etc. Why dont they just release the updates instead of whining.
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True
Yeah its defo a work in progress project that should not be released until it is at least a polished and developed product. Also way over priced for such a low powered device. Cheap lcd not even oled screen. Weak processor and horrendous bugged to hell software.
The people in the polyend forum seemed to think It was unreasonable to make such a request by having a user disable toggle note off and for receiving a device that is technically broken. They got very upset when I stated at present the Tracker plus is no more than a very expensive basic step midi sequencer for outboard gear and a door stop with one user stating I was being too brutal in my analogy when describing Polyend as an immature company that needs to invest in real beta testers instead of just using the general public.
Most people there don’t appear to use the more advanced features and mostly use it as a midi sequencer for outboard gear. I asked the question… What benefit is there having a monophonic kick drum pattern scattered over 11 tracks? That’s the tracker workflow somone said. Well never in my over 30 years of experience of trackers from protracker, octamed, fast tracker and renoise, have I ever ecperienced working like that before. It’s made to design they said. Well it sucks lol.
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I’ve found that in every gear company forum i’ve ever been in (except this one!). Fanboys shoot you down for making reasonable assumptions about the quality of a product and then finding they don’t tally with the reality. Been banned from most just for pointing out some very obvious and simple things wrong with the piece of that company’s equipment i have in my hand. Worse is when their own support team acts in the same way (a certain Swedish luxury toy company is notorious for this).
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