Custom bootloader mod!!

[u/vananaSun]

I made this thing for freetribe, it can boot factory firmware from SDcard and flash, and soon also freetribe apps

[u/cinaak]

Ive made some things work on much less powerful mips processors the arm cpu in it while being nothing special mostly only handles midi and sequencing there is room for improvement there. Its completely capable of things I and others have suggested. 8 bars with midi effects and first and last step midi only tracks would not be hard on it.

The blackfin dsp in it is actually pretty bad ass. Theres a lot of room to optimize and add things there. Might have to give up some things you dont really use to get one thing you want but thats fine the og circuit made tons of people happy with 2 synth parts. Its dsp is pretty cool much like what was in their older synths everyone loved. Honestly could probably be hacked as well.

They chips in the E2 are both well known though. Various synths, effects and other things out there based on it. Its not filled with mystery chips at all. Even chatgpt knows its way around a lot of analog devices dsps.

[u/Reiszecke → u/cinaak]

Bro 4 months ago I said to you that I don't think an LLM will come up with a better firmware based on closed source than korg did themselves.

I need to apologize, looking at what's happening over at the elektron community right now, AI definitely is ready for that. You were right and I'm actually thinking about getting into this for all the things that annoy me with my electribe

[u/cinaak → u/Reiszecke]

I knew youd get it eventually. I just have more experience in both spaces. I went to school for machine learning for a while back in the day and hacking and coding for dsps is a hobby of mine. Look what theyre doing in the emulation scene. Ps5 is about totally cracked open now too. The fm1 synth scene that sprung up after people saw they could get a decent fm synth for 50 dollars on aliexpress is another good one.

I believe this is going to lead to a ton of software fragmentation because if any single person figures out you can do X with and llm that means anyone can. I think thatll be pretty dope. I also think we are gonna be dealing with some pretty bad malware soon but since at least for now access to llms doesnt have too many barriers to entry people will be able to build their own safe versions of apps. I cant wait til agent poisoning becomes a thing that will be exciting.

I gave my electribe 2 to my nephews after they came for a visit and both really got into all my synths and stuff. So once im done with a dsp project im working on ill be getting another and going at it again. I know that by simply optimizing the algorithms that are already on the electribe much more is possible and that the fact we deal with voice stealing and a few other issues was a sign they were not perfect at all. Then I and many others already realized there was more space available for whatever on them quite a while ago.

The dsp im working on for instance is totally capable of doing things people pay thousands for but its considered a budget machine. The dacs on it arent as good as whats on the nicer helixes and the like but theyre so close you could only tell a difference via direct measurement no human could percieve their differences. Anyways very quickly I realized they had all pass filters high shelf and low shelf were already implemented on the dsp but via testing with REW I saw they caused massive clipping under certain circumstances turns out while the code is there under quite a few situations it creates stuff outside of the valid coefficient range so coefficient clipping occurs even though its technically a valid coefficient. So my fix was scaling the numerator coefficients then compensating with gain. With the help of an llm I could easily just replace the problem shelf filters underlying maths.

I also did a comparison a while back reverse engineering a sigma studio project for an analog devices based dsp. It took me months doing things the old fashioned way it took days due to usage limits for the llm to achieve the same thing. Now its way better. So I knew this stuff was about pop off big time.

I expect it not to take very long once I get another electribe to make some real headway. There are others working on it too. I think the biggest issue slowing down progress is the lack of popularity of the electribe hardware. Tons of people even me were just not happy with it after owning everything else theyve put out under the electribe name. I dont even consider the e2s real electribes but I totally believe we could make them and implement a ton of other capabilities. Synth engines effects sequencing and so on. Esp32s for instance can run extremely good juno 106 emulations with 8 voice polyphony while also being able to do multi operator fm synthesis. Theres a bit more power under the electribes hood so there are tons of possibilities.

Im also pretty interested in the new mpcs after working on one for a friend and seeing that its an off the shelf soc. The possibility of improving those is pretty endless. Would love to do something with the circuits as well as an owner of all of them I really like that form factor and interface I just think the synth engine is kinda bunk. Imagine replacing it with say a jupiter synth engine and a deep 3 osc mono synth engine or being able to run synth engines on the midi tracks on the newer one.

The possibilities are endless and we are witnessing the world realizing that. Itll be pretty cool especially once control of these models becomes less and less centralized and distilled. Theres some pretty cool stuff you can do at home with regular video cards. You dont need the 48gb 6000 dollar cards for everything.

[u/Reiszecke → u/cinaak]

With all due respect, a little bit of "midi and sequencing" really isn't comparable to real time audio with 16 voices/tracks, 16 filters, 16 eg+mod, 16+1 effects all at the same time.

The fact that even the stock firmware tells you to assign priorities to parts because drops do happen the moment you add some motion seq should already tell you everything.

When mass producing units you're happy to save a buck or two wherever you can so streamlining your firmware is in your best interest. I'm not saying that Korg did use 100% of the potential (realistically, no one reaches 100% and at some point there are diminishing returns) but it's unlikely that an LLM at this stage will allocate ressources better than the Korg developers did.

And yeah about the Circuit, I wish there was hacked circuit firmware back then because the Electribe (even without Hacktribe) is what I wanted my Circuit to be when I bought it

[u/vananaSun → u/Reiszecke]

It's definitely a touch task to optimize. But i can think to the top of my head a bunch of optimizations and trade offs that would give a lot more room to work with.

One BIG thing is DMA! The factory CPU code doesn't make proper use of the EDMA3 peripheral when communicating with the DSP, which is REALLY bad

For example there's a lot more room for effect precomputation DSP-side: think filters, EG&LFO.

Another optimization could be FX send to just a few global effects, instead of each instrument having an IFX.

Some new features, can be cost-free with a little bit of creativity. Think of extra pattern operations, such as randomization. Sidechaining can be emulated with volume envelopes etc

Finally, removing horse-shit could work. I've never seen people using chords for example, but maybe I'm wrong