Been there, done that. I have a Live and I use it mostly in the studio or when I am traveling to another location where I can just lay it down and use it. It is “portable” but not something you can carry around with you any day, which is what I am looking after and what I think the M8 would be great for. It’s just the workflow of the M8 that doesn’t sound good to my taste. It’s really personal, of course.
Adding +1 to this. I’m not sure what this device would be, and I don’t think it exists yet, but I would like it. That said, I should try using m8 headless for more than 5 mins.
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Speaking for myself, as a card-carrying M8 Community Member™, Trash80 has earned my trust that he’ll make good things wherever the wind carries him. If that means a new M8-ish thing with pads and knobs, I’ll be there. If not, I’m still there.
The community does get a little defensive (maybe too defensive, myself included), and I think that’s driven by 1) how good support has been 2) how unusually open Dirtywave is about process and goals, and 3) that it’s a two-person team (and was originally just Trash80)
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Yeah, there aren’t many really portable devices that offer what the M8 does, so you would be looking at some compromises.
Roland MC101 - Lots of great sounds, some good sound design options, battery powered, downside is sampling only over USB, which may or may not be an issue.
Ableton Move - Also has some goods sounds included, internal rechargeable battery, built-in mic, sampling (but missing some sampling features). The big plus for this one is that you can transfer your project to Ableton Live and complete it there.
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M8 + roland p-6/s-1/ep-133 as a controller covers the bases i’d say
There is too much preciousness surrounding use of hexadecimal.
It’s like a built-in gatekeeping feature.
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tbh as long as one can remember that 1 is now 0 and 8 is now 7 on the sequencer, the rest may as well not even use hex, considering all the visual parameter indicators and on screen help tools for specific values. i still dont know hex. trash coulda used wingdings and it would still be easy to learn
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It would be cool to have a decimal option. IIRC, it doesn’t because using two digits instead of three means you can cram more FX lanes and things on-screen
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yeah but that’s like doing the bunny song every time you tie your shoes. don’t you ever want to just put on your shoes and leave the house without singing a little song?
in fact, what if you only had to sing the bunny song when you put on one pair of shoes, and all the rest you could put on and leave the house real quick.
this makes a lot of sense but if some of your customers got wide feet and your shoes are only meant for narrow feet, then you’re either telling your customers this isn’t for people with wide feet, or you’re purposefully keeping it from them.
I get it, dude is cool as fuck and built a device for himself and shared it with the world, but some people in the world got wide feet. You can compromise, or you can keep it for those with narrow feet.
OP and me, have wide feet.
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I thought this too originally, and I’ve known hex for fifty years or so. But there are good reasons to use it. Besides saving on screen space, 16 and its divisors pop up a lot in music. It becomes second nature fast.
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What’s the name of the one that looks like a pocket operator on steroids ? This little thing seems to have some cool sound design and sequencing capabilities.
Woovebox?
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That’s the one.
Are you thinking of the Woovebox? I haven’t used one, but they sound cool, and the creator pops in here fairly often:
The Woovebox - a tiny and cheap but ridiculously powerful groovebox
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M8’s usage of hex is much easier to grasp than one would expect cause you don’t have to type it in like you would on say renoise. it’s all done with the joypad. I don’t like hex and m8 was easy.
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Another one I haven’t used but pops up around this topic is maybe the Deluge? Especially post-community firmware. Anyone have both and wanna comment on it?
I have no doubt that any reasonably intelligent person, given enough effort, can figure out anything that they put their mind to, but the barrier is: do I have time, money, and sufficient interest to invest in order to get to that point? and then you circle right back to “maybe it’s just not for you” but the entire point of the original post in this topic is that it would be for more people were it more intelligible out of the box.
It’s like saying “my secret language is more efficient than speaking english so I’m not going to speak english and if you can’t learn the secret language then maybe communicating with me isn’t for you”
can you imagine if someone said that shit to you about having a conversation? I’m not implying that anyone who has anything to do with M8 is saying this, but this is the impact on people outside of the M8-sphere, or perhaps more accurately the gameboy tracker-sphere.
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My brain struggles to work out hex but I hardly ever use it on the M8. I use the full numbers 00,01,10 etc and skip the others when making patterns and when changing values I just look at the help text at the bottom for the actual value. I haven’t worked out a single hex value since having the device. The only one I come across a lot is volume where I do wish it were more digits and not hex.
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Deluge fits the bill. Easy, fast workflow ( a beat is made in a minute when turned on ) once learned the button combos. Fits in the bag, has battery, encoders, lots of fun, and you can make full songs with it.
Only pricey.
Tbh, the M8 and Deluge were long time my 2 most go-to devices. Until the move and mpc os 3.0 came out. They are mow my most go-to together with push 3 SA.
Worth noting; ableton move for the price ( although some functionality is missing / could be added later with update / and only 4 tracks )
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but you understand that by doing that you aren’t getting the most out of the device, it’s working around the limitation, and something which is supposed to provide an enhancement being a limitation to the uninitiated is the very substance of what I’m saying if you read my prior posts.
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