Re: Repeater clock out.

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 10:43 AM 7/28/2002, Mark Sottilaro wrote:
>Right.  It does make the Repeater awkward to work with in that respect.
>Frankly, when you saw me at Loopfest, I was taking clock from the 
>AdrenaLinn.  How the hell could they let a product out the door that 
>didn't even work with other products from the same company?  Stupid.
>Then they get all snippy with me when I criticize them.  Again I ask the 
>question: How could they let a product out the door with an issue as deep 
>as this?  The mind boggles.  Didn't anyone at Electrix hook this thing to 
>a MoFX?  The only reason I never said anything was because I'm always 
>using another clock and I figured this issue was being dealt with in OS 
>1.2.  Oh well.

They shipped about a year late, which indicates to me the whole project 
was 
much harder than they had thought it would be. (I could have told them 
that...loopers are really complicated to develop.) That long delay was 
likely causing them big losses, so they probably reached a point where 
they 
had to ship something or die. So they shipped with many bugs, as we all 
know.

Also, many of the Repeater's weak points seem to be around real-time 
operation. Synchronization of loops is more difficult than it seems, and 
requires a tight, low-latency real time OS to do it well. I suspect there 
are some fundamental architecture problems in the Repeater that made 
real-time control very difficult for them. You can just feel that when you 
use it. When I opened mine up, I was amazed to see they were running the 
whole thing out of a single motorola dsp processor. Reasonable choice for 
all the dsp processing, but trying to do all the dsp plus the real-time 
issues of a looper ui, synchronization, midi, memory management, etc in 
that one dsp processor? wow, that's insane. It's no surprise to me they 
had 
so many problems with real-time stuff like sync. It may have even been 
impossible for them to fix some of the issues. Probably it was after many 
nights drowning their repeater sorrows at the local karaoke bar that they 
got inspired to change direction to karaoke.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com