User Replaceable CPU - THE DEFINITE THREAD - Which one? When? How? Etc

co-sign :slight_smile:

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MIDI inputs are opto-isolated, and require a few components between the socket and the UART pin to make things work. So some kind of hardware expander at minimum is required to get MIDI working on the 301. It’s not just software.

In any case, there are plenty of current and planned devices that can act as a MIDI-to-I2C bridge, hopefully there is one that fits your needs.

I understand, thanks for the explanation. I’m basically hoping Transit becomes more accessible to me either by it being sold or by me learning to assemble and power it myself.

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welcome to the club! :slight_smile:
and please turn to bug @anon17137829 by constantly mentioning his name.
and keep massaging our transitional dreams into his forehead. but please, do it softly and politely!
(i’m sure you will)
for he is also: just another busy man :rofl:

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He’s doing his best. :slight_smile:

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Is it possible in the future that the main little red board can be swapped out for a more powerful board allowing more cpu? Cause 80% of my patch ideas i cant achieve due to lack of cpu, even running at 48khz.

That is the plan. I still have a bunch of other things to implement on the ER-301 first though.

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That makes me excited!

Was trying to do a 4 voice polyphonic granular patch last night & didn’t make it 60% through before it just completely froze. So knowing that an upgrade in the future will come is exciting news.

Don’t use it as an excuse though. :wink: CPUs will always have a limit.

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Me personally, I like to play the game to just-not-max-out the CPU and get the maximum of ER-awesomeness in my patches. That being said, more CPU could get me more awesomeness :cowboy_hat_face:

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Are you running the latest “unstable” firmware? Because the functional CPU cap has gone way up!

Yes. I’m running 0.5.01 unstable 48kHz. I’m gona try to slim down some items in the patch & try to use more global chains

I pretty much never run into the CPU limits on mine, but I don’t use it like crazy. What kind of stuff are you doing?

Was trying to do a 4 voice polyphonic granular patch. So i had to cut it down to 3 voice & that works fine for now.

That makes sense. I have yet to really dive into the granular stuff.

It’s pretty easy to hit the CPU limit without doing granular stuff. Surprised to hear that wouldn’t be an issue for someone. I think this is not just to be blamed on the CPU but also because the 301 routing is so flexible, it’s easy to keep going and going. I’ve had mine for a season or so and quickly leaned to rely on external CV as much as possible. If you have enough external envelopes, LFOs, trigger sources, favor those. I’m using every single input on mine. I’ve also been experimenting with using global chains for all sources as well but have actually found myself in a worse position CPU wise but am having more fun, as I end up routing these to many places I would not have otherwise, which is awesome, but also introduces the need for more mixers and VCAs which adds up.

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I find myself starting from scratch very often, so I think I rarely build up huge patches. I also primarily use it as a mixer and for effects sends. I use a digitakt for most sample duties, and have other modules for most of my initial sound creation.

You ever plug the Digitakt into the 301?

All the time. I use the 301 to mix the digitakt and sometimes a model:samples (EDIT: actually a model:cycles) Being able to set the preamps for line level is pretty nice. I’ve been really loving sequencing the modular with the digitakt. I feel like it’s sequencer has some classically modular sequencer functions, like trig probability. Being able to automate 8 CC’s per midi track is really great too. Now I just need to get an expander for my fh-2. You can almost do patch memory that way, though I never do.

I haven’t tried mixing the digitakt with effects since I primarily use it for drums and find it’s on board effects more useful, since you have sends per channel.

I plan on getting a digitone soon ish and will probably use eurorack effects with that a lot.

I pretty much don’t use a daw, and just record in the 301. I’m a pretty specific case as making music is just a hobby for me so I don’t really multitrack stuff, just mix it all together, record a performance, and call it done. The only thing I find wanting is controllability of the 301. Hopefully I’ll rectify that with a 16n at some point.

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I’m commonly needing to reserve about 30% CPU just for my control layers. It can be dissatisfying when a pile of VCAs, counters, and I2C inputs eats as many resources as the audio units they’re controlling, but I recognize that my expectations are skewed: I’m accustomed to scripting on Teletype where my control rate is maybe 50 Hz, tops. While I wish ER-301 had more accommodations for control rate vs audio rate resource management, I also know that people expect super tight timing.

I also feel like some of my ER-301 CPU use is simply wasteful because I duplicate units to cover for the lack of things like sample flipping.

Here’s hoping that the next couple years brings us both new paradigms for high level unit controls, and also some development on a new SoC when the firmware stabilizes around those new paradigms. While I’m wishing, I should also hope that my schedule opens up so I can learn the middle layer this fall!

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