Today is WaveBoy firmware day! 0.71 is now out which, among other things, fixes a pretty nasty bug with the delay module. The bug relates to the buffer size not being adjustable and always defaulting to the largest size. This prevented a ton of fun lo-fi sounds and is a pretty important feature. The bug was introduced as part of the performance refactors made in 0.70. It’s been fixed and back to sounding glorious!
The delay module has also been formally renamed to Retrograde Orbit. Credit to my band-mate, John, for coming up with the awesome name since it’s both descriptive of how the delay works and is a kick-ass name!
The second major change has to do with the Sampler module. The structure of patches and metadata has been significantly revamped. This work has been coming given the JSON file conversions in other modules. Sampler now uses JSON files too. Instead of .txt files for each wave file, there is now a single patch.json file which stores the metadata for all of the waves in the patch. This now also includes the filename of the wave file being used. That means no more of those non-descriptive #.wav files but instead something like ‘snare.wav’. Wave files can also be resued between samples. That can be useful if you want to use the same source file but with vastly different settings. There is more work to do here, but this makes it much easier to build patches for the WaveBoy now.
The one downside is that the old Sampler patch structure has been thrown out. There is no conversion that happens on the WaveBoy itself to update old patches. I opted not to do this just to get 0.71 out sooner and assumed not many folks were making their own patches given how tedious it was to do so. It doesn’t take much time to convert things over, though if anyone runs into issues, do please reach out and I’ll gladly assist!
New patches are available on the latest SD card image which can also serve as examples for how to make your own patches. Just copy over the samples directory onto your own SD card and you’re ready to go! Be sure NOT to copy anything else (like tuning files) as you do not need to recalibrate or adjust tuning for this firmware upgrade. You only need to do that if you’re upgrading from a version prior to 0.70.
You can grab the latest firmware over on waveboy.bitbybitsynths.com/firmware. If you run into any trouble updating your WaveBoy, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help!
Enjoy the revamped Sampler and Retrograde Orbit!
