Re: A Repeater suggestion

[Andre LaFosse <altruist@altruistmusic.com>]

Hello all,

Mark wrote:
> 
> I'm really sorry but I can't get behind the nicey nice "everything is
> beautiful in it's own way" mentality going on about the wet/dry mix
> issue.  

All due respect, Mark, but I think you're oversimplifying my point of
view.  And being a bit unnecessarily insulting, for that matter...

> We're not talking about some oddball feature, like being able to
> "slip" tracks of a loop (which I admit is a cool feature).  We're
> talking about basic design here.

If it never ocurred to the designers at Electrix, then clearly it's not
nearly as basic of a design feature as you might think, eh?

I suppose people could have gotten mad at Oberheim for releasing a mono
sampling device in 1994 that recorded at lower than 44.1 kHz...

> The argument that it's supposed to be
> a hardware version of ACID doesn't fly either.  ACID as far as I know,
> doesn't record you in real time and drop you into a loop.

ACID was the example I was given by Electrix themselves, when they
themselves were describing their design concept for their product.  

I'm not trying to be an apologist for Electrix, man, I'm trying to give
you some insight into the point of view from which their product was
designed.  

Now, I'm sorry if you're frustrated at the Repeater being something
other than what YOU were hoping it would be.  But the unit isn't just
about the needs and wants of a specific user; it's also about the point
of view that the inventor of the company is coming from, yeah?  

Maybe take a minute or two before you start chastizing the company, and
try to get inside their specific point of view?  

Of course, taking a minute or two and actual having a tangible unit in
your hands to work with before you start making requests for
modifications is another possibility..

> but when they
> contacted me about features, I said "The footcontrol HAS to have access
> to wet/dry mix and loop fade rate. 

Perhaps the utter and complete absence of a Repeater footcontroller
sheds additional perspective on this concern...

> If you bought a car that didn't let you shift into
> reverse without turning off the car and restarting it, you'd make due.

Or, to put it another way:

If you pre-ordered a car from a company, WITHOUT having given it a test
drive, and you waited months and months while the company tried to get
an unprecedented set of design features in place for this new and
innovative car, and you didn't take the time to utterly and completely
familiarize yourself with all of the features in that car beforehand,
and then found that the car didn't do things the way you had thought
they might... 

...well, is that the fault of the car manufacturer, or the customer?

I mean, come on, man, the front and back panel, and instruction manual
for the thing, have been readily available via the web site for AGES. 
If you yourself never thought to check for the location of a wet/dry
control on the hardware interface of the thing, then how truly obvious
should it have been to the guys who designed it?  

Do you always plop down $500 or so for a product you don't totally know
about or understand yet?  If you do, is that the company's fault, or
your own?

> I'd bet you'd opt not to buy the car though, or if you couldn't, you
> wouldn't buy another car from that company in the future. 

Or perhaps that company would be reluctant to spend any more time
struggling to make stable and innovative products for a perpetually
dissatisfied and jaded clientelle?

[and Mark later said:]

> So if you can just mute input from output, we should be golden, as
> wet/dry mix can be handled by controling track volume.  True, one 
>function
> that could control wet/dry mix would be sweet, but I could live with this
> fix.  

There, you see?  It's not the end of the world after all.  

Who knows -- maybe you'll even find a way of balancing and crossfading
signals that would be impossible to achieve with one conventional
wet/dry mix.  (Apologies in advance if that's an excessively "nicey
nice" proposition...)

I mean all of the above with all due respect to you, Mark, and everyone
else.  But please, guys...  relax for a second.  

It's the day after Christmas.  That cool shiny toy you looked at in the
catalog for months and months doesn't quite do everything you'd thought
it would, or at least, not quite in the way you'd imagined.  

Relax, play with the thing, and be glad and grateful it's finally a
reality.  Once you've got your head around the thing, and are conversant
in how it operates... THEN it might be time to start making requests for
feature modifications.

Anyway...

--Andre