Designing and building a Eurorack module is an evolutionary process, or it is for me. The xVox Harmonic Pitch Shifter is currently at hardware version 3.2 and this is the first version that I have felt was ready to survive commercial distribution. I am sure there are some imperfections, but I am happy with the result and spend more time playing with my module than I do working on it. The 1.x hardware versions had a smaller (64x128) monochrome OLED display that was quite limiting. The 2.x hardware version attempted to pack in six pitch shifted voices rather than the current four which was really stretching the CPU capabilities and six voices were actually unwieldy, it also only had one audio input. It was only at 3.1 that I felt I had things nailed but there was a fatal flaw in the 3.1 PCB's. Somehow, I had got the pins on the USB-A connector swapped so it couldn't be flashed with new firmware, doh!
Actually, I made a custom USB cable to compensate for my error so I could continue testing with the 3.1 hardware. Whatever it takes... Anyhow, the 3.2 hardware all works, the software is feeling robust, and I have started to add some features that were in the plan but didn't make it into the initial firmware release. It my intention to continue to add features, this is as much my hobby as it is yours. I have a had a few suggestions, one I really want to look into is adding Scala support. Currently my scales are all even-tempered and only support Western scales. Firmware version 1.1 added a nod towards microtonal support by providing a Semitone/Per-Octave quantization option to Pitch Shift mode, but this is mostly for creating chorus-like effects. I think I lost count and accidently skipped firmware version 1.2 but the latest firmware version 1.3 has as pretty exciting feature, it's a vocoder function.
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AuthorGreg Burns is a retired software engineer who is spending his retirement writing software. ArchivesCategories |