In hopes that there’s a second generation of Aeros in the future, here are some ideas for improving the hardware:
Most important:
Nice to have:
One can dream…
Good golly quit giving them new ways to take my money. It keeps working on me. As for the list… add silent buttons and I will buy one. (shhhh… don’t tell Singular Sound)
… and make the On/off-button electronically, so the unit powers on and off like a computer - and you ears dont get blown away when wearing headphones as you turn the unit on.
Would be nice for the unit to indicate it is powered on immediately after turning it on. The Aeros has the longest time of being “blank” of any device I’ve used.
It takes a long time for the display to show anything beyond a black screen. If you are in a darker room, you can see a hint of blue through the scroll wheel earlier in the process.
Perhaps add a small light pipe for the blue light to the surface or display something on the LCD immediately (even if it’s text). Wonder if the latter is just a software update on the current hardware?
The next gen Aeros should be a sampler with looper functionality. It should dispense with ‘parts’ and ‘tracks’ at the fundamental level and instead be a device for recording, overdubbing and playing back samples, in whatever order the player likes, with up to six playing concurrently. Ideally it would also allow recording different samples from different inputs concurrently.
The full sampler functionality would be accessible only through MIDI commands, but the Aeros would have the ability to execute MIDI commands from MIDI files. You could upload a MIDI file to the Aeros and associate it with a particular song, and the Aeros would start playing the file when you start the song, responding to (per sample) record, play, stop, etc. commands when they occur, for fully automated looping. It could also send MIDI instructions from the file to your other gear through MIDI out. Thus it could be the MIDI brains of your pedalboard.
Finally the Aeros should also operate as a stompbox looper as it currently does, with ‘parts’ and ‘tracks’, controllable via the footswitches. But this would just be a ‘special case’ of the more versatile underlying sampler functionality.
midi maestro, bb and aeros one device. maybe a singular sound preamp/mixer with an octave down and maybe mic input.
As we go down the slippery slope, add an amp modeler with boosts, reverb, effects.
Dangerous talk here.