Hi Guipel. I don't expect further firmware updates for the Orba 1 as the focus of development has now moved to the more powerful Orba 2. However, if you wanted to experiment, it's possible to access an 'experimental' unreleased quantisation facility in the Orba 1. (I've found it reasonably effective.) This is a repost from the Facebook group.
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2) Install Putty for Windows
3) In "Serial", choose 115200 for baud, and COM12 or COM13 depending which you see for the Orba in Device Manager
4) In "Session", choose "Serial" and click "Open"
5) Press "q"
PS Here's a couple of demos recorded direct from Orba 1 which both used this quantisation IIRC. They're not especially musical, but the first was to demo alternative tunings and the second to demo extended loops.
Hi BJG145, thanks for letting me know about this hidden feature.
I'll give it a try and will get back to you.
Just curious, what are that parameters in the logs? (1,1,1,1)
1, 1, 1, 1 mean drums, bass, chords, lead enabled.
0, 0, 0, 0 means disabled.
If there's a way to enable them individually, it's not been discovered.
The Orba 1 is always recoverable from crashes, so you needn't worry too much if it goes wrong. You can just flash the device and make a clean start. Something else to bear in mind is that certain information is written to flash storage and read on startup, so you might find that quantisation only kicks in when it's turned off and on again...but once it's been enabled in this way, it's fairly resilient, and will stay on until it's been disabled again.
There's a slight quirk about the way the Orba handles the start and end of loops. Internally, the first note sometimes gets added to the end of the loop instead of at the start. I tend to play the first note very fractionally after the first click, as recordings occasionally seem to go wrong if it's played fractionally before.
Quantisation is set to 16th notes and there's no know way to change that. That's pretty quick, so you have to be fairly accurate in the first place. If you play the note too out of time, snapping to 16ths might move it in the wrong direction.
Incidentally, @Subskybox recently discovered that it's possible to send commands to the Orba 2 using the "echo" command on Windows (or Mac alternative) without having to go through a terminal program like Putty. Depending what port appears in Device Manager, you might be able to use something like this on Orba 1...I haven't tested it though.
set /p x="q" <nul >\\.\COM11
Incidentally, I'll just add that I've never had a crash on the Orba 1 that couldn't be recovered by flashing from firmware. The Orba 2 is different though, and I've messed mine up, so people need to be more careful hacking around with that.
"Orba 1 can't get all updates that were added for Orba 2, specially samples and additional bar loops"
PS the extended loop example above was created as follows:
1) Record a song file with an introductory beat, eg just one drum hit
2) Copy it
3) Edit the XML and change the "nBars" variable (to 32 in this case)
"Come on, calculating averages and rounding timings shouldn't be that complex"
The quantisation feature on the Orba 1 can be turned on and off; it's "non-destructive" and only affects playback, but on the Orba 2 I don't think it can be turned off once enabled, so it seems this may work via a permanent change to the data itself.
IIRC the sequence data in the XML files indicates that timing works in a 'relative' rather than an 'absolute' way, where changing the timing of a note affects the timing of all subsequent ones, and the sequence also has tons of performance/modulation data along with the note data, so overall quantisation isn't easy. I don't know if this is the same on the Orba 2.
@BJG145 thanks so much for all your inputs.
I have the impression that the hidden quantization is not perfect, but way way way better than not having it. At least now I can have some fun with Orba 1. Not sure why Artiphon doesn't include a switch to enable it on their software.
Btw, have you ever experienced situations where you can't simply delete the loop?
Sometimes my device gets crazy and ignores the shortcut to delete loops. It keeps not recognizing these attempts for a while. Usually, I have to reboot it.
guipel
I understand that Orba 1 can't get all updates that were added for Orba 2, specially samples and additional bar loops due to physical limitations (storage/memory/processor)
But quantization shoudn't be that hard to add on Orba 1, I can't believe that it would consume that much extra processor power that only Orba 2 has. Seems totally possible and reasonable to add this only extra feature for Orba 1.
It could be as simple as creating a mapping grip at the first track recorded and calculate the time average of a vector size 8. And for every track simply snap (round) the timming to this precalculated grip.
Come on, calculating averages and rounding timings shouldn't be that complex. It's unacceptable that this can't be added.
The device is amazing, but without quantization Orba 1 is useless.
Artiphon is still selling Orba 1 and should have some consideration for its past and new customers.
ARTIPHON, PLEASE, ADD QUANTIZATION.