The Three You Wanna See!

[DanielMulholland]

This forum is chock-full of TONS of great idea for future updates. Some desired features are rather banal, others quite zany, some more popular, others less. But I wonder, (out of my own curiosity, and maybe to help centralize ideas for the devs) What YOUR top three would be for the next update?

Imagining this is the last update (knock on wood) and you could only opt for three features/improvements, what would you want to see?

My top 3 are:
1. Some kind of bit crushing, rate reduction, etc. to dirty up samples.
2. Keep the master compressor, but open up the controls. Be able to set threshold, ratio, attack, everything. (Including a drive into the compression, pretty please!)
3. More midi friendly sequencing. I just want to hop over to the sequences page and use the knobs and my midi controller to throw in a sequence, no more zooming in on the touchscreen and accidentally pressing three steps at once with my fat fingers.

What do you guys think; what are the features at the top of your priority list? I think with enough traffic it would be really interesting to see what the mode response is


Edit:
When I started this post I suspected we would see some outliers, but overall, would be able to find a few requests that kept popping up time and time again, and thereby readily expect for future updates. Instead, almost every response has entailed completely separate requests which each user would find indispensable to their own approach and workflow with the blackbox. I'm honestly really stoked to see just how malleable the blackbox is in a studio setting, and I think 1010 should be very proud of the many eclectic positions their little product has been able to fill for their users!

[jayneural]

These three for sure :
+ a compressor bus assignable to selected PADs as source/targets to bring some side-chain
+ a manually editable SONG section with stem export

[zznmeb]

TBH I'd like something in the Blackbox / Bluebox form factor that did everything the Blackbox, Fireball and Lemondrop do and maybe had an FM synth too. Another thing I'd like is the ability to mount the SD card on a host PC without having to eject it from the Blackbox, put it in a reader (which many people have to buy), reading / writing and then putting it back.

So my top three are

1. Wavetable synth
2. Expanded granular including processing the input
3. Host SD filesystem access

[jayneural]

yep, they should definitely do that. Teenage Engineering almost did this with their announcement today but man $1200...

A device that has synth, sampler, sequencer + mixer with plenty of inputs/outputs would be a dream. I would accept twice the size of the Black/Bluebox if it does have an AA batteries compartment

[toupeira]

I would love a device like that too, but in a slightly bigger form factor with both TRS and some 3.5mm jacks, and full USB multitrack audio and MIDI I/O :-)

[Georges]

16+ pads, 16+ seqs, beyond 4/4 song mode meter

[softroom]

Mine are fairly harmless and obvious:
1) visual indication when pad in its attack/release phase
2) user colours for pads
3) Full support for loops of user-selected lengths and meters rather than the current 4/4 fixation.

[Jack Pimiento]

1) Option to remove sounds from the headphone out. If I'm sending a sound out of output two. I don't need it coming out of the HP output as well.
2) Adding beat sync option to the granular settings.
3) Some distortion and perhaps another couple of effects. Two at a time is fine just a bit more choice.

Honourable mentions.

4) More modulatable parameters in the granular section.

5) Select a pad that will side chain/duck any pads it's routed to. So, say pads 5,6 and 7 are droning away, pad one could be selected as the pad that will trigger the ducking. Every time pad one triggers, 5,6 and 7 will duck/side chain.

6) Assignable LFOs. So at the cost of an LFO on it's 'home' pad, it can be routed to control a parameter on another pad.

[DanielMulholland]

Yeah routing sounds to either 'out 3 or out 3/no HP' would be perfect. Make that possible with all of the outs.

[Georges]

+1 for side chain and foreign LFOs

[jayneural]

Then an editable song mode with stem export and then we're good

[arteom]

edible song mode you say?

[jayneural]

Yes right now you can only record sections, but would be cool if you could manually edit :
- which SEQs are active in the section,
- how many BARs the section is
- the section that will automatically play after.

Once we've got that, stem export makes sense too.

[Georges]

Stereo mix down and multitrack export would be nice, for you would not need to spare a pad for this purpose.

[-thus-]

I use my Blackbox to play multisampled instruments and it's so close to meeting my needs. I just need these 3 features so synth patches sound right when played with an external keyboard:

1. Legato — when you hold a note and play other notes, those other notes don’t retrigger the envelopes. “Note priority” is a common setting of this feature that affects what note is heard when multiple notes are held at once. Critical for playing bass and lead sounds (like Minimoog and acid bass).
2. Portamento — the pitch of a played note is arrived at by smoothly sweeping from the pitch of the previously played note. “Time” is a common setting that determines how long the sweep should take. Also critical for playing bass and lead sounds.
3. Sustain — respect the loop points in multisample wav files so that notes can be held indefinitely. Critical for most synth samples but especially organs and pads.

This thread really shows how differently people use their Blackbox.

[DanielMulholland]

Yeah that's why I wanted the thread lol. Some people approach the blackbox like and oldschool sampler, others like a eurorack brain, others like a daw-substitue, it's awesome to see all the different uses.

[byrdinbbylon]

My Top 3 Would Be:

1) extra page of 16 pads (so a fuller drum kit could get it's own page separate from loops) and 16 sequences (just to cover more song building/transforming options)
2) ability to select multiple notes on piano roll in a sequence and move or cut/copy/paste
3) on slicer, ability to either remove or disable slices or to selectively assign slices to pads in the pad sub-screen of the keys screen (for samples where I only want a few parts out of a longer sample and don't want to have to have pads that fire the junk I don't want)

[DanielMulholland]

So I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to achieve with the pad assignment thing, but if you're trying to do what I think you are then it's definitely possible, it just requires a little planning instead of being able to do it via the menu (which would be admittedly easier lol). But say for example that you have a long sample, and you just wanna steal the kick from the very beginning, and a vocal grab from like two minutes into the sample, and you don't want to have to deal with all of the other slices.

Well, the slices correspond to note data, and you can have as many or as few as you'd like, placed wherever you want. so, place a slice at the very beginning of the sample, and at the end of the kick transient, and now your kick is assigned to your first pad (provided your first pad is assigned the value of C1). Now, instead of assigning your second pad to C#1, assign it the value of D1. Now, your second slice on the blackbox will have no corresponding pad trigger. The second slice starts at the end of the kick transient, where you placed then end of the first slice. Now, just scroll all the way through the sample to the start of the vocal grab and place your third slicer. Now, pads 1 and two on your midi controller trigger the kick and the vocal, with slice point number two not being triggered by anything on your controller.

Kind of a weird example, but the bigger point is that if your pad controller moves up in whole steps from C1 instead of half steps, then you can always determine which slice you're working with by simply placing a dead slice in between the points that you actually want.

[byrdinbbylon]

I was not thinking of assigning slices to a MIDI controller. In that case, since you can custom map any controller key or button to any MIDI note number, you could effectively skip any slices you don't want to hit when assigning note numbers.

I was thinking more of using the touch screen for entry with no controller.

For instance, if you have a slicer pad with 10 slices made and you go to the pad screen by pressing the KEYS button twice, you will see 10 square white boxes that you can hit to trigger the slices. If some of my slices were junk or space between sounds, I have to remember which of the 10 boxes have the good samples and which I need to avoid when performing into a sequence. I'd prefer to disable 3 of the junk slices so that only 7 of the slices show up as square pads on that screen. It would make it easier to punch in a sequence, especially if there are a lot of unusable slices.

[DanielMulholland]

Ahh gotcha gotcha, that makes sense

[Tabularis23]

Not necessarily related to the sampler functionality, but I'd love to see a simple oscilloscope added if the hardware would support it. Would save me lots of money and hp space.

Edit: wrong product. I thought this thread was for bitbox.

[superBad]

Would be:
1, Start and loop point in midi clips. Similar to sample loop points, but for midi, so its possible to start and loop a selection in a larger midiclip
2. Granular synced to grid parameter as in Lemondrop. Or a few more parameters similar to lemendrop.
3. Midi clip additional CV /Gate output, if it not implemented

[sc1640]

Another one: read/open MP3 and other lossy codecs please! We all have huge mo3 libraries waiting to be sampled

[sc1640]

I do, but if I can have my entire iTunes library on the SD card, I can simply load the file, select, trim, very fast - plus avoids the digital to analogue to digital conversion etc.

[jayneural]

So you mind about DA/AD conversion, but not at all about lossy codecs ? ;-)

[sc1640]

Hi, I’m lazy…haha

[BoscoTheWT]

Hi, I m new here and work with the Blackbox for about three weeks. It is nearly perfect to me but I have some wishes to optimize my workflow.

1. I would like to have a step by step sequencing mode to take single notes with the keyboard with the length of the sequencer grid.

2. Audial feedback would be nice when I edit notes in the sequencer grid.

3. Analog to the scale functionality some chord input helpers would be nice, when playing without an external keyboard.

Blackbox is a fantastic tool and lets me smile, when I m not at home. Thanks for your great work.


Sorry for my bad english, I m from Gernany and not a foreighn language talent.

Bosco


PS.: 4. A simple transpose funktion for sequences would be nice too.

[chuckleone]

I would really like to see the Blackbox's Song Mode get a full fledged feature release.

1. Timeline view for Song Mode (ala Ableton Live, Logic, etc) This UI would have a linear timeline where each pad is represented as a track/timeline showing either MIDI notes or wave playback. Allow for zooming and editing/deleting individual MIDI notes, wave looping, etc. A simplified song creation process would be nice too, like capturing one shot pad/sample triggering as an editable event on the track timeline, drag and drop(or insert) wave files into a track(great for building backing tracks)
2. Time signatures/BPM changes on song mode timeline
3. Sample normalization/gain adjustment on pad slots

[Ziggy99]

I’d like to see a “sleep mode” button like the Bluebox has. +Everything else mentioned here.