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I have all versions of 1.4 (1.3 as well) in my Eigenlabs folder. New versions are added to the folder in their own folder. (Windows).

Ive been trying for six weeks to get my Pico to work. I have never got the cello or clarinet to work. And as for the others (piano, bass guitar, and synth, they are subject to frequent crashes. I see that many other posts also report crashes. And quite a few ask for more adequate manuals than just four scanty video tutorials. Is anyone co ordinating the compilation of a decent manual, because Eigenlabs seem to be acting like a fire brigade, just jumping from problem to problem.

1.4.X will remain stable now but most likely won't get any new updates beside bugfixes anymore, so most are concentrating on 2.x now - which is still much in flux. (many from the community have very limited free time so we have to see what has a long-term-value for us all and won't be outdated too soon. Putting much effort into something that nobody wants anymore once it's finished is frustrating.)
For major documentation projects it's presumably best to at least wait for 2.0 testing which should be out pretty soon (from there on it is much more likely that things will be added rather than dramatically changed).

There is in fact some documentation effort going on in the wiki which also contains non-video text-and-pictures material:
http://www.eigenlabs.com/wiki/2.0/The_Official_Documentation (e.g. the tutorials in http://www.eigenlabs.com/wiki/2.0/Workbench/ are a nice start)

In which areas would you specifically like to have more or better documentation?

Your problem with the cello or clarinet sounds strange - did you blow into the breath pipe for the clarinet and "bow" on the strip for the cello?
Regarding crashes:
* Do you have these problems with the 1.4.11 version?
* is this occuring with the unmodified Pico standard setup without any additional VST or AU plugins loaded?
* How much RAM does you computer have?
* do you have a special operating system configuration (e.g. did you disable the swap file)?
* do you have occasional crashes with most audio software? (Then it could e.g. be the audio driver).

Out of curiosity: Would you be interested in buying a Basestation-like box with built in sounds and audio outputs that "just works", so you just have to connect this to your Eigenharp, switch it on, play (and optionally connect via WLAN with e.g. a tablet to modify values with a web browser based Stage web-app and to create user setups with a web-Workbench)? And would that be worth ~the price of a Pico to you (so the Pico get's two times as expensive)? (This product is not existing, just interested in whether people would like something like that - I most likely would buy that if I really like a hand full of these factory sounds.)

BTW, cogreslab, have you looked at the seminars? The quality of the video isn't great, but there's a lot of good information in them.

@cogreslab

I'm sorry to hear that you're still having problems. I know that Neil has spent quite some time with you on the phone trying to get you started and when I spoke to him this morning (I've just reviewed your support contact records) he said that the last time you spoke he left you making noises with the Clarinet and 'Cello and that he hasn't heard from you since. I know that you had to upgrade your laptop from 1G of memory and that you had some virus problems that were making it behave strangely. Are you still having issues? If you are having problems as basic as with the samplers, Clarinet and 'Cello then this does point to something a bit more fundamental wrong in your environment than something with EigenD - that stuff hasn't had a serious bug reported in a long while. There are a lot of people playing Pico's on Windows these days without any problems at all - most of the reported problems seem to come from the use of third party VST's, quite a few of which are not entirely stable and are quite beyond our control, either that or inadequate hardware.

In the meantime, please use the bug reporter if you experience problems - we get sent a whole load of useful diagnostic information when you do and if you are experiencing a bug that we can fix then we'll do our best to fix it. It's a bit hard to do so without a bug report though.

BTW, if by 'Eigenlabs seem to be acting like a fire brigade, just jumping from problem to problem' you mean fixing bugs as they come up in as timely a manner as we can, then, yes, that's exactly what we try and do. I can't apologise for that, it seems a good response to peoples problems to me. We manage our bug tracker quite assiduously and problems that might impact live performance always get a very high priority here. Thankfully the bug counts are low at the moment which has enabled us to concentrate on getting 2.0 through the experimental phase towards testing and adding steadily to the documentation for it at the same time. We're still doing some bug fixing against the 1.4 release (there will be another release fairly soon with some fixes against some reported problems in it) but it's not consuming that much time at the moment.

In response to everyone talking about contributing documentation, we have an area on the Wiki for this if you want to use it here. Some areas of the Wiki are 'read only' as they're for documentation that is 'official' (it needs to be right as the in app help is derived from it too) but there can be any amount of writable pages. If you see an edit button on a page, you can write it. Please go ahead and make whatever pages you need, it would be great to see some community contributed input. You guys are the ones who have a direct experience of learning and there's no better way of knowing what needs to be explained. That's exactly why we made a Wiki for our documentation in the first place.

John

Hi Randy

You're right, for a while sections of the Wiki were read only and it all felt a bit random as to which bits and some of the bits that were definitely shouldn't have been. This was because of a bug when we introduced versions (which we really needed to do when we made it is the actual authoritative source for different release documentation) - versioned pages all became read only by default. This was far from satisfactory and Jim did some work on it late last year to separate the 'read only' property from the version data. Much of the Wiki is now writable again, even when versioned. Anything which has an edit link can be written. Please be careful to edit the right version for the software you're talking about - I've made that mistake a good few times now, it's easy to do. Versions are copies, so editing 1.4 for example won't change 2.0 and vice versa. Once a new version exists changes won't propagate forward, so it's usually best to work on the latest one. If you find something that you think should be writable and isn't please let me know.

John

This thread has wandered but I wanted to say that the most recent update process worked moe efficiently for me, thanks

Mike's right, the documentation discussion is somewhat off topic for this thread. I started a 'requests for comments' thread a little while ago which was asking for suggestions about documentation. This was mainly to help us to make sensible choices about where to spend our effort next here at Eigenlabs, but it seems very reasonable if it were to expand to include any people who are thinking of adding to it too. Here's that thread, if you would like to continue on it.

@cogresslab - I've replied in detail to your documentation comments on that thread rather than here.

We have not been able to ascertain why you cannot seem to run the 'Cello or Clarinet. I understood from Neil that the last time he spoke to you on the telephone they were working, is this not correct? And have you sent a bug report in? If you have a technical issue, it's very hard for us to know what is wrong if you don't..


John