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... eventually.

Drum Loops - instead of 16 loops, it might be nice to have 2 sets of 8 that automatically swap or, perhaps have the loop toggle, toggle between multiple loaded loops. This would make intro, body, fill, ending switching playable in a small keygroup. It would also be nice to have multiple drummers (see set lists) although I guess this is doable now?

Arrangers - An editor in workbench that allows setting up an arranger would be nice and avoid a lot of scrolling it should also make it possible to set the velocity and hold time of each entry. This might be a thing for the metronome but triplets, swung notes, shuffle time, etc would be welcome additions.

Metronome(s) - in general, eigenD is incredibly effective at managing scales and tonics. It would be great if it was as good in a rhythmic dimension (see comment in arrangers). This should not be just about supporting various items (like triplets and so on) but also about performing with them during a song. Are multiple metronomes possible? Would it be better to base time on a single timecode supporting multiple rythmic agents?

Set-lists - the notion of selecting a song from a setlist (much like selecting a split from a setup) would be vary powerful and a great performance aid, particularly if each item could have it's own split, loops, rhythmic settings, arrangers and plugin choices. One would just work their way down the column of lights as they worked through a set. I think the implication is that the master mode key picks the song and the split selection is moved to the song mode key (presently the split mode key). Such that each song could have its own split??

OK... I know these are a bit off-the-wall and likely part of some far future thing (or possibly something left to the reader as an exercise once 2.x is available) but they are simply things that came to me as I was playing

Hi Mike

Great ideas.

The drummer thing is probably quite easy - keep on at us about something like that and it'll get done, feel free to nag.

The arranger editor has been on the wish-list for a long time. The arranger is due some love in 2.1 or 2.2 and think that's when we'll get to having a go at that. This is properly hard, so nagging is unlikely to make it happen sooner, we all want something like this.

Metronomes - you can have two (or ten) in a setup so you could torture things to do almost anything. There's probably better ways to give you triplet support though - this would be an area for it's own wish-list, you're quite right it would be good to have more flexibility in timing management. The core system supports almost anything, so this is a matter of small improvements. It would be very worthwhile to try and define some use-cases and wanted features - in this area it's usually not the problem to implement things, it's exactly what to do that is the issue.

Set lists. You can do this now. Define a Talker that loads different setups, then save setups with the changes you need in turn. This would be the canonical Eigenland way to do this - if you find they aren't loading fast enough then we'll work on that, it can be an issue with some setups but with leanish ones it's very fast - in theory there isn't really a better way to do this. This is a nice idea for Factory Setups, I'll see if we can add something in for 2.0. We've been talking about having setup loading status feedback possible (in fact just last week we were talking about this) by attaching a light to a Port on EigenD - red for 'loading' green for 'loaded'.

John

Hi Mike

The set list thing is an interesting example of what I was on about with lighter, leaner setups. To give you the background (which needs little technical digression), the way that all 'program state' is managed in EigenD is through the Setup Manager. This saves and restores everything in a setup, including loops, Port values, recordings, the lot. This is where, if such a thing is to be done, 'switching between set list items' would live. When one recalls a different setup to the one currently loaded, nowdays the Setup manager performs a 'difference calculation' to see what is different between the two (it used to just throw the old one away and reload from scratch which was very slow), then only loads the changes, after it has unloaded things that are no longer needed. This process takes a certain amount of time. It's got quicker in the last year and could probably be quite a bit quicker still with some more work. It still has to go through the whole setup and check to see what differences exist though, even comparing things that may not be used in your sets, and that is where smaller, lighter setups really help - less stuff to compare means a faster load. The difference can be startling, going from tens of seconds to one or two, certainly fast enough to be very usable in a set.

We have worked on the idea of giving some smart clues to the Setup Manager to help it make these transistions very speedy, in the idea of 'patches' where you specifically tell it the things that you want stored in a setup. This is probably more in line with your thinking, and it's a nice idea. It's technically very challenging though and has a lot of nasty corner cases in use where the user or the system could get very confused indeed, corner cases that we would need to be sure the player was aware of in a nice way, which is always amazingly time consuming to write. We have defined the problem quite well and it's not going to be something that we can do that soon - working on making general setup changes faster and improving that as a way to step through a set is probably a much better use of our time for now. If it could be made fast enough, the idea of 'patches' might never be needed.

John

BTW, I don't think we can use the mute key as a mode key, as far as I remember it's all implemented with VHDL in the silicon in the Alpha/Tau themselves and never gets sent down the wire. I'll check and see though.