Boss looper products are very interesting. They are well built and have great features. But they often have key limitations that would be so easy to fix with a bit of design or software. They are a big company and tend to only ship bug fixes and typically don’t ship until all is complete. I suspect that leads to lots of tradeoffs to hit a date. They are also getting a bit dated in their ui tech (suspect that they need to use a base electronic platform shared with other products). Perhaps dinner of this is marketing/positioning of feature sets, but I suspect there’s more practical, less nefarious reasons why this occurs.
I made a decision a year ago to go with Aeros over Boss et. al. It’s not perfect, fairly pricy, but it continues to improve. It was the right decision.
Conclusions about specially created problems in Boss’s devices I drew after many years of use and disappointment in their products.
When RC-3 came out, I did not understand why there were only 9 rhythmic patterns in it, when in the previous model there were 30 of them. Someone begged the Boss to reduce the number of rhythms, why did they do it? In the RC-10, for example, if you change the recording rate from 120 to 119 bpm, then the sound degrades very much, and in the RC-300 there will be decent quality.
I have a lot of such examples, too lazy to stomp on the keys.
In Eros, I was immediately attracted by the possibility of working in a parallel loop, which I was still thinking about using the RC-10, but I could not even dream, since the Boss is too inert and never listens to users.
Easy for us to say what should be in a product or not. We have no skin in the game or knowledge of the details that can take a simple thing and make it hard. Compromises are often made to hit a date. Prior decisions add debt than cannot easily be overcome.
That can be hard to impossible to do well in real time depending on the power of hardware or design of the underlying os, libraries, etc. Much easier to go twice or half as fast. I’m hoping Aeros can do that well and it not at least allow some offline easy to deal with this (e.g., only when stopped).
I actually already said that I basically agreed with what you say in this dedicated post regarding the separation of the settings, and I still do.
That makes perfectly sense and should be added to the list of things to definitely avoid.
Repeat after us @BrennanSingularSound: “I swear I will never allow a config flag to be used for independant purposes anymore. I am Brennan and I approve this message”
That may always look like a shortcut or good idea at first sight, but this can only lead to problems.
All the same, the quality is much higher than that of the RC-10, which is proved by the specially introduced deterioration, especially since, as I already wrote, the RC-500 normally changes the tempo. At Boss, the marketing department carries more weight than the engineers, who are truly some of the best on the planet.
I’m a bit surprised by the delay as I found the bug in the Aeros not saving the pencil Data properly. I would have thought that it was an urgent update.
I updated the original post with the latest version 3.2.10
We think this is finally stable enough to be an official release, so we’re posting it here for you guys to try out for a few days before we put it out over the WIFI.
Several times over the past few days, (with the prior 3.2.x firmware, not .10) the Aeros started recording immediately upon pressing record … rather than waiting for the start of the next measure while sync’d to the BB. It was a pretty annoying issue.
It went away later on. Settings were correct. Might have been a BB midi connector issue (hate that mini din). If this is a midi signal issue, would be good to have some obvious indicator while playing on the Aeros. Can the background change if midi clock is received or not?
I had change time signature several times and cleared/edited the song settings. This has been an issue in the past.
