Another Video. I hope there are going to be more.
Thanks Tom for including the TBD.
2 Likes
Perfect colors. Love grey!
1 Like
Hey do you guys think it would be possible to host a discord for the tbd16 to ask questions share patches or new machines and stay updated about the device?
We have had a internal Discord in the past. Which wasnāt used much.
But we could make a new one or enable Chat on Discourse? So here on the Forum.
Not sure what would be the preference?
Should we create a TBD ā Discord Server?
- yes
- no
0
voters
1 Like
Discourse (the open source software that powers thus forum) offers chat features that just need to be enabled. It is useful to have all the information and community in one place that is publicly searchable and owned by dadamachines & open source.
Discord is, in the end, a separate space, private, not publicly searchable, and owned by a company that makes money with our data and can change the terms any time they want.
In general, this forum could be better used to have as many conversations as we want (instead of a single TBD topic), add chat, documentationā¦ Discourse is very powerful!
3 Likes
Personally I would prefer Discord. Itās widely used and itās easy to reach out to companies and people that way. I even made an account here to vote. 
The fact this forum already exists (and is open source I guess) I think now the thing to do is to reach as much potential users as possible. While there are downsides to Discord I think the positives outweigh the negatives.
It would be useful to spell out what are the advantages of Discord, other than it has a cool aura and many people are used to it (including its flaws, like non-public discussion, higher noise vs ratio due to the nature of the conversations, hard to build a knowledge base, and therefore having newcomers asking questions that have been answered before but are hard to find).
How does Discord help reaching out? You still need to promote your Discord channel yourself, wherever your potential users are. Same with this forum, but at least being the content in the open makes this forum easily indexable by search engines and the AI bots.
About having to create an account, if this is important, Discourse supports Discord login, and other āsocialā logins (via plugins).
But well, for a small open source project, having your community and your support and documentation in one place is very important, If a Discord is opened then some people will get short-term satisfaction, but the developers will have a hard time keeping a critical mass in two places, with the likelihood that this forum will die even before it had a chance.
Promoting a Discord server is as easy as putting a link on the site like most companies do.
The benefit of Discord over Discourse is that most people donāt know Discourse so it wouldnāt do much compared this current forum that already exists.
Iām not implying Discourse is terrible or anything btw. Just that I never used it and will not use it just for that one company Iām interested in. So unless Discourse gets more popular Iām not using it and I think that will happen with the majority.
I have no stake in Discord other than I using it to reach out and talk to many people. I would call it more a chat platform than a forum also. For quick easy communication this seems to be working out great. At least for me it does. For others it might be other popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook etc (which I all donāt use). And I wouldnāt call Discord or any other platform a better replacement than a basic forum like this thatās attached to the companies website.
Open source is awesome but I feel sometimes those who are hardcore like that tend to loose focus on other things that are important as well. All I personally care for is getting the word out and have people hyped about this groovebox.
Thanks everyone for the input.
Itās helpful to hear the different preferences.
For now, weāre going to keep official community/support discussion here on the forum and pause the Discord vs. Discourse debate. The main reason is focus and bandwidth: weāre a small team and weāre currently fully concentrated on hardware production, the software roadmap, documentation, and working with our testers. Splitting conversations across multiple platforms right now would slow us down and make it harder to keep information consistent and searchable.
So the decision for the moment is: no public Discord server (yet).
Once the product has shipped and things have settled, we can revisit whether a Discord makes sense at that stage.
A quick note on contributions: weāre happy to onboard developers where it fits, but at this phase we canāt provide 1:1 guidance for every idea, and we also canāt open up everything until release. The best way to help right now is to keep discussions concrete and actionable:
- bug reports / reproducible issues
- feature requests with clear use cases
- documentation feedback
- tested solutions and examples
Iām going to close / de-escalate this thread here so we can refocus on shipping.
Thanks again for understanding and thanks for the energy and support.
Johannes
8 Likes
Justin has said that mcl Can sequence the machines.
Yes. But we probably need to work on this a bit more.
For me it is interesting to know who would want to do testing for that.
1 Like
will the processor boards be user-replaceable? if you do future hardware revisions with beefier processors/more ram etc etc, would be really nice to be able to just switch the boards instead of replacing the whole unit.
p.s. just found the tbd-core. good stuff
The Main PCB is easy to replace.
So upgrades are quite doable for everyone.
3 Likes
Will there be some form of stem-separation or multi-track audio over USB option for mixing? It looks like there may be just a single stereo output.
Will there be per-track 3- or 8-band EQ and/or compression? If it canāt send separated stems or multi tracks out, this would at least allow mixing to be done on the device.
Will there be the ability to record smooth (non-steppy) parameter changes, or just per-step parameter changes? Is there a limit to the number of lanes of parameter modulation per track?
from what i gather, there might be 2 stereo ouputs (headphone and line out, routable separately), and for starters no usb audio, but technically that would be possible, so maybe at a later date.
Currently TBD-16 is 2-channel audio out and 2-channel audio in. Headphone out mirrors the main/line out, so there are not two separately routable stereo outputs today.
We are prototyping a hardware revision to enable a separately addressable headphone output, since this is a frequent request.
On USB audio, stems, and multitrack over USB: it is not available right now. We are investigating USB Audio as part of a composite USB device setup on the ESP32-P4, alongside USB MIDI and USB NCM (network). At minimum, stereo in and stereo out over USB are probably achievable, but how many total USB audio channels are feasible beyond that is still unclear, mainly due to the ESP32-P4 SRAM budget of 768 KB and overall system constraints. Because the platform is open and configurable, advanced users could also choose to disable features they do not need (for example USB network or USB MIDI) to free resources for other features.
Same story for per-track EQ/compression and smooth automation versus step locks or modulation lanes: these are software features we are evaluating, and priorities will depend on real-world constraints and user demand. The key point is that this is an open platform, so you can request features, contribute, or build what you need on top of the existing firmware and plugin architecture:
https://github.com/dadamachines/ctag-tbd/
As Peter Kirn highlighted in his CDM article, the whole idea of TBD-16 is a compact, capable groovebox that is open by design, meant to be customized, modded, and extended rather than locked to a fixed feature set: dadamachines tbd 16: a groovebox that's compact, capable, and open by design - CDM Create Digital Music
4 Likes
Thanks for a thorough answer. Iām interested to see what people do with it.
On USB audio, quick update from our side: I actually got stereo USB input and output working today, but I still need to do more testing before we call it solid. Weāve had stereo USB I/O working before, but this is the first time weāve had it running inside the Groovebox firmware.
3 Likes
this is a nice demo that showcases ergonomics and workflow, reasonably flickerless screen in the latter part of the video.
1 Like
Are they already getting released? Iām confused!