very, very excited about this release. it looks as though DETUNE has been playing closer attention to the DS-10 community's feedback. some things that i've noticed:
- just being in a digital-only release format (like the M01D) is HUGE. this means that updates and bugfixes become relatively trivial based on the emerging needs and trends of the community.
- composing looks like it'll become easier as it seems to have borrowed much of the same copy/paste functionality that the M01 had. scrolling i guess will be done primarly via the circle pad, which allows for a two-handed approach to navigation. the DS-10 used to have tiny scrollbars that made it kinda difficult to scroll through this kind of data.
- the DS-10 had 16 patterns of song data; the DSN-12 has basically 4x this amount in the form of 4 banks of 16. not quite as much space as M01 tracks had, but still much more comfortable amount of breathing room, and it's clear that DETUNE recognized that many people weren't using the DS-10 as a glorified MPC, but instead, as a means to try crafting full-blown compositions.
- from this, It seems the live pattern mode will be much more flexible. the DS-10 allowed only one pattern to be launched at a time; the DSN-12 has what looks like the ability to launch 4 patterns simultaneously, one from each bank of A/B/C/D. the "lock" button, as before, queues pattern changes until the end of the current pattern, but i wonder if the mute/solo buttons will also get queued?
- the oscilloscope is most likely just for show but it's one of the coolest 3d gimmicks i've seen. very few 3DS games allow such direct control over what's happening on the screen. and like Xurlik said, hopefully this opens the door for more possibilities with visuals.
- MUCH finer control over effects. for the DS-10 you could only choose one of delay, flanger or chorus and you had to apply that one effect to some combination of the 2 synth channels. for the DSN-12, it looks like you can set 3 different FX "sends". the first two allow you to choose between 5 different effects; the third is always a reverb but you can choose between 5 different kinds of reverb. you can activate, per channel, any combination of the 3 FX sends on the mixer screen:
- you can now set the tempo / pattern length per-pattern, whereas before it was only a song-level property.
- it's too bad they couldn't figure out a way to implement some kind of MML-like representation of note data, like they did with the iYM2151. i understand though if that introduces an unwanted level of complexity; still, it would have been nice for the option to be there to dig down deeper and have finer control over the note data to do pitchbends and vibratos more easily. (or maybe the functionality IS there but hasn't been revealed yet?)
Last edited by bryface (Jun 26, 2014 6:39 pm)