Hi guys so Ive had this 404sx for about a few days now and was wondering... did anyone backwards engineer the .bin format of the pattern files yet?

I looked into it shortly and was able to change a short pattern that played pad A5 to play pad A6 instead. The pads are stored as midi note numbers so 0x2F is A1 (see manual page 47)...

So did anyone research this? Is there even need for it?

Keep bouncin'.

Quick update: I can also alter the velocities with which the pads are played. So I can take a pattern, open it in a hex editor, change the pads and their velocities, save back to SD card and 404sx will eat it.

Update #2: Managed to change for how long a note is being held. Also figured out the positioning system inside the beat (96 PPQ-based, see manual p.49), just minor details missing in the puzzle.

Why not try: http://labs.rumori.hu/bankrobber/ ???

Wow, I didn't know! That's awesome!

However, I was thinking about something like a small tool that will read pattern and pad infos and allow you to track it to multiple seperate wave files... so you could load it up in a daw and mix?

Not sure if there's any demand for that or what, but Id love to have that.

This would be good idea if the person didn't use any effects or rendered effects to the samples themselves.


However, I don't know how many people use the 404's sequencer since it's not very good. This would more likely be a project for 505, 555 606, etc. as those sequencers are much more friendly and flexible and usable.

Yeah my idea, but that might be just the way it works for me, is using the portable 404 to sample/track/arrange/compose... so all of the music related stuff... it also keeps you out of the sound-design trap and almost all you can do is chose fitting samples and play with the arrangement/structures.

And then after that's done, go with it into multitrack and do all the mixing, panning, all that stuff that the SP is really bad at

I started writing a little C++ library for reading pattern/pad/stp files from the 404sx... maybe Ill put that online open source for all other projects to peruse... and after that I can add a module that will take that info, let you select a pattern and export the individual stems as they appear in the sequence (except the lo-fi effect, which would have to be resampled in order to be tracked out).

Thoughts?

So you wanna create something like this: http://www.renoise.com ?

Nah it's more about a little tool that will let you select a pattern and export it as multiple wav stems (pads separately, but according to pattern)... and then load those up in cubase/reaper/whatever

So actually something like Samples+Pattern=Multi-Wave-Export

And as a bonus a checkbox to export all waves normalized independently.

Prolly not going to happen anytime soon. I would just get used to doing it the old fashioned way (recording it yourself).

Im working on it. Will post stuff as it gets done... but may take a while )

So I managed to read out patterns/pad_info files, samples and combine it all together to export seperate waves for a pattern of my chosing. Looks & sounds good (in audacity). Loop/Gate/Reverse isn't supported yet so I tried it on drums first (all non-gate, non-loop, non-reverse).

Console output:


Audacity:

gate&reverse supported as well now... as soon as I have "loop" and AIFF working I'll add a little GUI and post a beta... anyone interested in testing the beta version? I can make a linux or windows build from here (but mac is just a matter of recompiling on a mac).

Put together a gui... this thing works for me now.

You can name your pattern (like "intro") and the tracks will have that name in them (easier to manage in a DAW).



Happy tracks, normalized and ready to go. The different file sizes are due to mono/stereo.



So if anyone's interested, let me know, I could make a beta build. I'm gonna be using it myself anyhow

definitely interested in a beta build.