GR-MEGA update & audio demos

It’s been 2 weeks since we opened preorders and it’s been a success. The backlog is filling up nicely. As mentioned previously we’ll start fulfilling orders early February. The ones that preorder now will probably have their unit in June. As such, we urge the ones who were on the waiting list before preorders opened to put their preorder in before the end of the year, otherwise they’ll be moved to the back of the list, and will probably have to wait until late summer or even autumn (!).

We’ve not been sitting still and have made the following new audio demos on our in-house prototype, for your listening pleasure. Everything was recorded directly from the unit, demonstrating its powerful effects and their modulation options, the FFT phase vocoder, clocking in multi timbral, slicing, and more. Enjoy.!

In terms of development, the progress looks good. We’re expecting the first new casing early December. We’ll first evaluate the silver one, and then get the black one anodized and painted. We’ll be sure to make a photo shoot as well. We may need one more iteration for the casing, although we all hope this will be the final one.

The firmware is getting more mature every month. We’ve recently added the ability to load and save projects, progress bars, and the ability to quickly cancel any load or save. Long sample support is now also included, meaning you can preview your hours long field recordings direct from disk without delay, and load them at leisure. The GUI is a lot more readable as well: compared to earlier firmware versions and especially compared to the GR-1. USB sticks are recognized a lot faster as well.

In the next weeks there’s going to be a lot of work on the phase vocoder, to smooth out the performance, work on the GUI to optimize menu navigation, and things like MIDI out and streaming of digital audio (over USB).