Reverse engineering the OP-1 drum patch

https://schollz.com/blog/op1/

by qrv3w • 6 years ago

109 50 6 years ago

schollz.com

mkesper• 6 years ago

Nice work automating some tedious work. But come on, that spec is only 31 pages. Read it.

tleb_• 6 years ago

Looks like a hug of death, see https://web.archive.org/web/20200519073029/https://schollz.c...

fractalf• 6 years ago

Nice article. The synth, though cool, is way overpriced. Just about doubled since release. Nice if you have one, not worth the money to buy now though

robotmay2• 6 years ago

Yeah it's one of those devices that I would love for noodling about with but I can get so much more for the same money. They're ~£1000 here at the moment.

speedgoose2• 6 years ago

Yes it's expensive but it's super easy to sell. It's also my only electronic purchase that got more value with time.

It's so cool that I would recommend to buy it at the current price if you can afford it.

robotmay2• 6 years ago

I probably would have bought it if it was still around the £800 mark but it's now up over £1000 and that's just insanely expensive considering what else is available at that price point.

I'd love to see a proper competitor to the OP-1 come out to force their price down.

Rockslide4• 6 years ago

Yes it's expensive in some ways and in others it isn't. Can you get a better synth for the money? Sure. Can you get a better sampler for the money? Sure. Can you get a better sequencer for the money? Sure. Can you get a decent synth, sequencer, and sampler for the money? Well, not necessarily. I'm not saying the price is entirely justified. You certainly pay a lot for the "brand". But on the other hand it might not be as overpriced as one might think by intuition.

Plus, as a owner, I hope price will only go further up, or at least stay on that level :)

capableweb4• 6 years ago

Plus, as a owner, I hope price will only go further up, or at least stay on that level :)

How does a high price benefit you as you own it already? Seems a bit egoistic. Maybe you're planning to sell it? Then I would understand your sentiment, but otherwise, seems a bit strange.

uhnuhnuhn2• 6 years ago

Can you get a decent synth, sequencer, and sampler for the money? Well, not necessarily.

Not even close to true. Deluge, MPC Live, AKAI Force are all waaay more capable and cost about the same new as a used OP-1.

jsilence• 6 years ago

Can you get a decent synth, sequencer, and sampler for the money? Well, not necessarily.

If you are ok with transfering samples to the device via a web interface, the Novation Circuit is an absolute killer answer to this question.

Sure, the OP-1 is a gem, no doubt about that, and I would love to have one. But for the price the Circuit is a really really nice, unsable and accessible device.

devin3• 6 years ago

I own an OP-1 and a mess of other synths. The Deluge comes close. I love my OP-1 for its size and portability. Being able to hack up a song on an airplane exclusively on one device rules.

fit2rule3• 6 years ago

I have an OP-1 and a ton of other synths - its a very handy thing to throw in the bag and take to jam sessions, but beyond that - definitely overpriced.

I get just as much fun from an Axoloti synth, with far more power... of course, I had to build my own hardware interface around it, but that's just fun too.

rjmunro• 6 years ago

I would be interested to know what teenage engineering say about this. Hopefully they'll approve and provide more details. If it's "You will void your warranty", then I would avoid buying from them.

tomashubelbauer2• 6 years ago

TE are known to not be fans of modifying OP-1. The OP-1 repacker project which is used to patch and load new firmware had its maintainers reach out to TE on their official forums and the thread got deleted by admins if I'm remembering things correctly (it was a while since I hacked on the OP-1). In any case, they definitely did not publicly endorse modding the OP-1s and they do not like to see it done.

gnu8• 6 years ago

Evidently, only they are allowed to do engineering. The rest of us are expected to shut up and buy the products.

devin3• 6 years ago

Yeah, and dumping firmware on OP-Z has proven extremely difficult if not impossible. It's encrypted in AES + CBC with an unknown key size. You can upload unencrypted firmware, but if you can't decrypt the original, well... good luck.

wayvey• 6 years ago

TE wasn't very exited about the modding but I think they we're more annoyed by the OP-1 beta firmware leak. I'm the one who wrote op1repacker. There was never any pressure from them to stop modding the firmware and as far as I know no thread was deleted. Main thread is still here, it's a long but interesting read https://op-forums.com/t/custom-firmware-on-the-op-1/4283

gnatman• 6 years ago

On one hand, I think companies should make their hardware easy to hack on- all sorts of cool creativity comes out of those projects. On the other hand, I think of the customer support team we have at my small company, and understand that TE (or other companies) might not have the bandwidth or skill set in that department to help customers that are bricking their devices in novel ways. I’m curious how to balance that.

tomashubelbauer2• 6 years ago

Personally I think the correct balance is this: you mess with your device = you void your warranty, but we don't issue take down requests for reverse engineered firmware, schematics, tools etc.

Just let the parallel hacker universe exist without C&Ding it into oblivion, but don't encourage it if you don't want to.

I'd be curious to hear counterpoints to this approach, the most obvious one I can think of is customers either pretending they didn't break their device by modding it when they in fact did or not even pretending and instead trying to cancel the company for having this policy because they feel entitled to support even if they venture on their own path and are warned beforehand it's a territory outside official support.

"True hackers" IMO would not try to do this, but I think there is a certain group of people who want to try these cool hacks, but don't want to suffer the consequences.

jlarcombe• 6 years ago

Korg have been excellent at this in recent years.

droopyEyelids• 6 years ago

You're pretty explicitly allowed to load patches into the op-1.

This isn't really reverse engineering or modifying the hardware - rather, the file format and a software workflow to create those files.

tmountain• 6 years ago

How hard would it be to develop an open hardware platform to deliver something similar to an OP-1? Do any such projects exist?

lalos• 6 years ago

This is close enough https://github.com/OTTO-project/OTTO and https://www.critterandguitari.com/organelle

Wesxdz5• 6 years ago

Mmm, these might be a nice start, but I don't think they're in the same tier as the OP-1. The appeal for me is the world class integrated visual design and build quality.

Wesxdz5• 6 years ago

I bought an OP-1 and it is the best product I've ever used. However, I was wildly disappointed to find the MIDI control input doesn't work with ALSA sequencer consistently (I need this functionality for a programming side project). I submited a support request, but it's kind of frustrating that I don't have the capability to just fix the firmware myself. (Specifically aseqdump only works after restarting the computer and RtMidi qmidiin doesn't print anything and also prevents aseqdump from working if called..., if anyone knows why I'd love to understand)

qrv3w2• 6 years ago

That's too bad! I've used the MIDI and it works well albeit I've only written things in using WebMIDI not the ALSA sequencer. I'm really curious about your side project, would you mind sharing it?

Wesxdz5• 6 years ago

For sure! I'm working on an open source gameplay framework and one of the 'upgrades' I'm planning is MIDI based manipulation of trees of gameplay values at runtime from knobs. You can read more here https://wesxdz.dev/bicycle-mango

Wesxdz5• 6 years ago

I SOLVED IT~! I was trying to run one of my old games using wine and SDL debug logged that MIDI would not work because of 'Unknown SEQ default' (sorry for lack of detail, I took an image of the output instead of saving the text -_-) Installing the amd64 version of libasound2-plugins resolve the issue. Not sure why this is not the default on KDE Neon... https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+qu...

Reverse engineering the OP-1 drum patch

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