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Looper's Delight
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Total luddite non-programmer commentary here: I've seen the idea of Aurisis taking over Repeater development mentioned in a few different places, and to me it seems like a pretty dubious proposition, if only for one main reason: The EDP is a very different beast than the Repeater. For one thing, the hardware of the Echoplex, and the user interface, is very much linked to the software inside - even the dozens of DirectMIDI commands in LoopIV are essentially more immedate and flexible versions of functions which originate from various front panel/EFC-7 button presses. So it's not as if the Loop code could just be ported into a completely different hardware chassis and have all of its architecture accessible in a reasonable manner. Another important consideration is that the Repeater and the EDP have very different design angles and philosophies. They're coming from different points of view about what would be interesting or important to have a looper do. A very large part of what makes the EDP so intuitive and "playable" has to do with the tremendous depth with which Kim and Matthias have pursued their core concepts about the unit, and an awful lot of time has been spent working out very minute details, many of which don't necessarily reveal themselves to users until after months or even years of use. As Matthias mentioned a couple of days ago, it would be possible to have four simultaneous loops in the EDP without feedback or volume control, but that's not a direction he wanted to pursue. And as Kim has mentioned many, many times, the EDP was designed principally as a real=time audio-editing performance tool, with the idea that loops could be evolved, edited, and otherwise "played" on the fly, with the emphasis on flexibility and user choice. So a lot of what makes the Repeater what it is (loop storage, multiple tracks, a more "recorder" - based paradigm, pitch-shifting, etc.) have very little to do with where the EDP is coming from. There are a lot of things I think are very cool about the Repeater, but I'd much rather see Kim and Matthias (and Claude Voit and Andy Butler and Chris Muir and the rest of the Aurisis extended family, for that matter) put their amazing creativity and resources into further developing their own very distinctive and unique vision, rather than trying to tack their ideas onto a completely different piece of gear that was designed largely with different types of applications in mind. Anyway... --Andre LaFosse http://www.altruistmusic.com