i love the 404.

i've got the original but someone in our band has had it on permanent loan for shows because i play guitar/keys mostly.

i just bought the SX version so we have two now and i can trigger some long atmospheric samples and loops etc, mess with the effects, and also have the effects to hand for recording etc.

BUT.....i've been playing a microsampler (compact, easy all in one way to get things like m-tron flute etc out of the box and play live) for a few months....and now i'm revisiting the 404, it seems a LOT more limited than i remember it.

it's great to have 120 pads to hand without having to wait for banks to load, and i needed the long sample memory, and i love the fx (though yeah, vinyl sim is nowhere near as cool now)....

but simple things like

having metronome whilst sampling (not the lame 'visual' one),
pattern resample
and pitch (without workaround)

are surely really easy things to implement....

i'd like to see at least the first two of those in an update......i understand that they want tp sell 555's (WAY over-priced right now and defunct memory cards...hence me getting the 404sx) ..but i don't think a couple of these features would kill the 555 market. and if they're not careful they'll start losing a lot of people to the microsampler. which has an amazing workflow....

does anyone know if an update's on the cards? pretty sure they did one for the firs 404.....

p.s. i mean

pattern resample WITH fx.....

one of the coolest things about the microsampler....but the memory is pretty small, so if you do this a bunch of times with a view to building a song that way and having lots of contrasting effected loops in the arrangement, you run out of memory pretty quickly....the 404sx could kill it, if roland wanted to.....

doubt it. sorry.

Roland'a view toward the SP series is "why release an OS update when we can give it a new paint job and 1 extra feature and sell the whole thing again"

yeah, i'd thought as much....

i was hoping maybe they'd rushed out the sx hardware to rectify the redundant memory card issue, but that they were perhaps still working on it's OS to make more improvements than the one or two that they made over the original 404......

a shame. some little tweaks and it would be so much better.

as it is, besides the copy pattern addition and the easier to find memory cards, i actually prefer the original 404.....the effects were a bit more lo-fi/extreme, to my ears anyway...and i probably preferred the old sound, rather than the linear wave sampling without compression/reduction.....

roland, if you're listening, please UPDATE (software, NOT hardware) with

pattern resample with effects
metronome whilst sampling
pitch

you'll sell a lot more and not lose so many customers to the microsampler....

I doubt we'll see a product that fulfils every need. The 404 is a great "sample bank" but I don't think they'll make it everymans sampler with just an o/s update. There probably is room for some tweaks - it depends how much DSP power is going spare under the hood.

There are other products to look at. I'm intrigued by the Electribes now they've been updated to take an SD card instead of the really obsolete SmartMedia. It's the E-SX1SD I'm thinking of. Personally, I'd probably get the synth/pcm based E-MX1SD instead and keep the 404 for my own samples

Jim