As best as I can tell, the Aeros has no explicit save action. The manual says it will autosave when the song is stopped. This makes me wonder about a few things:
When I stop and the Aeros is saving, will there be any delay to start the song again? Or can the Aeros do the save in the background and resume immediately? Resume and record immediately? ’
Wondering if l stopping and resuming the song can be used for a break in a song or an unplanned part, or …
Do I have the choice of going back to the “original version” of my song or save a copy only when I want to save? In a device that has manual save, I can mess around with a song, change it, and then decide to save the changed song (overwriting the old version or saving as a new song).
Geek Alert: Any concerns about “wear leveling” of the flash/sd card? Surprisingly these devices have a limited number of write cycles. Over time flash loses capacity depending on the number of writes. The SD card can easily be replaced. The internal flash (emmc?) isn’t so lucky (and is smaller which is a double whammy). Autosave could make this a lot worse. Wondering what’s the number of times the autosave can kick in before we lose 30% of space in internal memory ? I suspect after many years, we might need to migrate all songs to SD card and preserve the internal memory for system updates.
Currently the Aeros autosaves whenever you stop playback. However we did notice that this causes a delay in restarting it if you recorded a decent amount. So we will be changing this to a manual save action with a button on the Aeros stopped screen (and a MIDI command for hands free saving with the MIDI Maestro). This will remove the pause on restarting issue as well as allow you to go back to an earlier saved version of the song.
We did build in a wear leveling system for the flash – but I do not have an estimate of the expected write cycle number. We’ll look into that.
That’s spot on. No need to share specs about the wear cycles as the manual save makes that much less of an issue. It also minimizes power-off while writing corruption, and gives the user ownership of it. To be fair, every looper on the market with persistent loops has this concern. And the on screen save button and midi control is perfect.
Would be even better if the scrollwheel was useful for selecting on screen buttons, scrolling, changing values etc. Would need a globally unused footswitch method to “click” the selected element. Perhaps pressing two buttons together? It’s a power user feature for sure. Touch screen is nice when the screen is off the ground, but bending over is a pain in the back and hazardous to your headstock. Touch screen has lots of marketing appeal (perhaps worth the extra parts cost).
We are working on making more of the UX accessible through the footswitches and the scroll wheel to minimize the amount of touchscreen interaction you need to do during a show. First up will be starting new songs and selecting saved songs. Then we’ll work on more of the settings being accessible. Which settings do you see yourself changing while in the middle of a show?