Cryabetes,

“1 – why? A five-pin midi I/O-to-USB adapter is decently cheap, doubly so if you have one on a midi keyboard you’re using for the computer (in this hypothetical setup)”

You have a very good point here. Despite some lackings that the 2880 has, I think that most likely I will be able to get what I want here by using a midi adapter. However I have two reasons for wanting to think about changing the firmware to add this capability. First, we have now pointed out, there are problems with syncing the 2880 with midi. I have used a synth-side midi out before to try to do this but I just couldn’t get it to work. With the setup I had. There were problems when I changed the tempo as you said, and I never got the two outputs to be perfectly lined up with each other. I am dreaming of either fixing this problem with the midi, or trying to circumvent it with the usb. The other reason that I want to look into this is that I am simply a student that is interested in operating systems. I am curious about how musical real time systems work.

“2 – have you tried doing “instant” program changes with an outboard sequencer at all? no good with the current firmware – it doesn’t change instantly, it ramps up and down on the speed, which screws up your start/end points – they’ll no longer align on the sequencer and the 2880.”

I don’t actually have much experience with using midi with the 2880. The only set up I have ever been able to play with was where the 2880 was the tempo slave. (I have only one midi keyboard and it only has midi input) I was sending the midi out of the 2880 into the keyboard which was in turn read by ableton live. That attempt totally failed. The tempos would never match and there was delay between the two out puts. I was never able to figure out if the 2880 was the culprit with that or not. I am not terribly interesed in making that setup work, given the fact that 2880 temp is controlled with that little slider (suitable for standalone looping but not really as a master control).

That being said, no, I have not tried what you said in point 2. But isn’t what you said motivation to try to improve the firmware?

“3 – have you tried hotswapping loops via USB while the 2880 is playing? playback glitches, the computer reads errors, it’s a mess. No bueno.”

Again I haven’t tried that but I had figured that the 2880 would not be capable of that. I am not to worried about that problem either because I don’t really want to change the data while it is playing. I will always do that between plays. Though it may be an interesting capability, I think that is is probably impossible. Based on the fact that the 2880 does glitch when you mess with the data in the cf card, the 2880 probably only has this card as main memory. I would suspect that the only other form of memory in the 2880 would that which holds the firmware itself (which is probably flash given that we were able to upgrade it.) An interesting though is that the unit might be able to do something like buffer the loop data on the cf card itself, perhaps somehow only making a portion of the card available to the computer connected to the unit via USB for changing the data. This would be a pretty cool upgrade that I didn’t even think about! Another idea I am having is that ability to have multiple loops on one card. It always bothered me a little that you can only have one loop no matter the size on the card.

“4 – Not worth voiding the warranty on a $400/discontinued unit.

Another very good point. I’m quite used to voiding my warantees tho. Also as long as we are able to upload an old version of the firmware, we should always be able to restore the unit back to former capability.

By the way, who are you? Are you associated with EHX? If so I think it would be so cool if you could hook me up with an engineer or something over there who knows about this. Maybe you could ask someone who was in charge of engineering the 2880 to looking into the people that worked on the firmware for me. Don’t worry about customer satisfaction with this customer here. I already believe that the 2880 is bad ass, and am a fan of EHX. Also I am not that type of kid who takes apart his toys and then crys when they don’t work any more.