E-Control is D E A D – move on

Well thehorse, you beat me to the first post but just wanted to add 2 things. First a quick thank you to Ray Maxwell for finally putting us out of our misery and ending the constant speculation. Very disappointing news indeed, but at least we now know and can move on.

Secondly it is indeed interesting to note that as you have only joined this forum a week ago and in this your first post you tell us to stop bugging this great group of folks. Now that we know what the situation is then yes perhaps we will stop asking, but how dare you come on here and start rubbing salt into our wounds. Very strange that you would jump straight into the defense of the company from no where, and I suspect that you are either a member of Eventide or perhaps have a freind working there, such is your initial post. Really gets my back up that.

Now, while I do agree that Eventide make excellent products, the H8000FW in particular is absolutely stunning and every time I use mine I remember why I bought it. But this news is a big  disappointment to me and I feel that I have been led up the garden path by if not false then certainly premature advertising and announcements re the E-Control. Probably my own foolish optimism, but never again will I be fooled by broken promises of future products before they see the light of day as I had the same thing happen with another well known keyboard manufacturer a year or 2 ago.

Having said all this, I do undestand that things go wrong especially in such a competitive industry and thank god the H8000FW can still stand on its own two feet. So I guess our hopes now rest with Doug, howdy there matey 🙂

Or for a mere extra £1000 there is still the Eve/Net. 🙂 Anyway rant over and thanks for finally givng us closure even if it wasnt exactly the news we were hoping for.

All the best chaps….but dont feed us false hope like that again…please 🙂

I'm personally very annoyed. It has been promised for years. I bought the h8000 for £5000.To control it via midi I have to copy the program and have no plug in to co-ordinate.

Allegedly e-control is halted because of slow transmission over midi. I paid all this money for a machine with firewire. Are you really telling that firewire cannot handle the extra bandwidth?

If access can manage it for the virus I really do not understand why eventide cannot for a £5000 firewire box. Its nothing to do with impossible it feels like its about resource allocation. All of the recent effort has gone in consumer pedals, nothing at all on the high end boxes.

It makes me feel that I should sell the h8000 and give the money to SoundToys and lexicon PCM.

Can anyone provide a cogent argument (either than you'd like to do it first) as to why I am wrong?

Kind regards

You have every right to be annoyed.

E-Control is halted because of slow transmission. Firewire has more than ample bandwidth but that is not where the bottleneck lies. The H8000's original design did not have a Firewire interface. The architecture dictated that in adding a Firewire interface, it be connected to the DSP. The DSP is flat out and must run audio without any hiccups. The CPU handles MIDI and that's the connection that we've been struggling to optimize.

As to your thoughts about resource allocation, I can only say that you're mistaken. Our two most senior software developers spent many months on E-control over several years. We hired an experienced outside consultant. We finally got to alpha and had to face the fact that we were fighting a losing battle. We have spent a lot of time and money on E-control and would not give up on it if we believed that we could eventually deliver a product that was useful.

Of course, I appreciate that none of this matters to you. We mislead you. We believed we could make it happen – we couldn't. We can't. We're sorry.  

Thanks for answering.

OK fair enough. Apology accepted! It still does all of the things that I thought it would other than e-control. Maybe you could work on easier page access via midi. Some way of addressing programs without copying them?

Kind regards

Thanks for the suggestion.

But a simple "E-controlled" patch browser (librarian), is that so hard?
I dont mean to be rude, I'm serious and my question is not intended to offend.

As i mainly use the presets, I would be so pleased with a plugin that would  just serve as a patch-browser which only organizes, scrolls and loads the presets. I dont seek VST/au control over the parameters or edits/creates patches, a detailed smart librarian is really all I need/want….

+1 for the patch browser . 

another idea maybe ,  is to emulate the evenet remote .. through LAN connection . 
its already done, right ?
great controller , just need to be ported 🙂

seems like a doable mission as well . 

my guess is this would eat into their revenue on selling EVE/NET controllers, unless those units aren't selling well.

seems like it would be the smart way to go since apparently the control protocol and the physical transport mechanisms are already in place with EVE/NET.

Ok, E-Control was dead since the H8000 arrived ! It is not a news !

Now, Is it possible to have a preset manager software to manage presets of the H8000.

The goal is to choose any presets of the library to do asign them to any inputs/outputs. A concrete example is to do large patchs of 4 presets (because the h8000 has 4 stereo aes   inputs/outputs) and send them to the H8000.

It is not the sky !! All over compagny/audio products  like axefx or tc electronic do that !!

AXE FX : http://www.fractalaudio.com/p-axe-edit-software.php

Don't say that Vsig do that !!! Vsig is not the AxeFX software !!!!

H8000 is a good product but too complicated to use and too expensive. When you have a product that costs 5000 euros, I think it's not the moon to have a decent manager software !!!!!!

Yipes. I just downloaded and installed the axe edit software on my Mac to check it out, but it messed up the permissions on my applications folder and now I can't run any of my programs. I've posted on their forum, so we'll see what happens next. Worst case, I think I'll have to wait until I get back home and find my installer disc and reset the permissions. (I'm running OS X 10.5.8 and I installed their version 1.0.191. If you want to try it, make sure you have the disk utility running or have a terminal window open in case you need to reset the privileges.)

Anyway, a remote control and preset manager for the Harmonizer is not a trivial project. I've been working on one for quite a while now. My guess is that the original designer(s) concentrated on the effects themselves and didn't realize that there would be users like us who would want this kind of remote control…

Hi Doug,

that is not normal behavour for Axe-Edit, I have been running it for years on my Mac and PC without anything bad like that.

Although I have not run leopard in years, they are very helpful over on their forums so hopefully they can sort you out.

It is a very good editor, the patch management has been poor up until the last but one release

It certainly makes using the Axe-Fx a lot easier.

Fellas,

We respect Fractal and their products. And, we try to keep this forum as open as is reasonable.

But I must say that I'm a bit uncomfortable with discussions about companies and products that are either real or perceived competitors. We're not knowledgeable enough about non_eventidian gear to moderate these discussions nor are we wise enough to know if and when a line is being crossed.

So, kindly take this discussion to a forum that is more appropriate for this topic. Thanks.

Totally understood

Just as a follow up to my earlier message, if the permissions on your Mac OS X applications folder ever get borked, all you have to do is get info on the folder, then click on the lock at the bottom, enter the admin password, reset the permissions, then click the lock again.  Learned something new!

The formatting on my previous message didn't turn out the way I expected, but I can't edit the message to correct it, so I'll add this here:

Basically, I wanted to reiterate that work progresses on a remote control/patch manager, but it is not a trivial process.  I think it will turn out great, but I don't think it will ever run as an RTAS or VST/AU/etc plugin.  I have some ideas to provide similar functions though.  Stay tuned…

It would be great if the source-code of the current e-control software became available. It probably won't solve the issues with it, but I am sure it will kick-start some interesting new projects involving the H8000-series, potentially generating more sales.

I can think of a few, I am sure you can think of more:

– software dongle for commercial H8000 patches

– dynamic website, which can process or generate audio with the H8000 in its backend.

It seems like such a waste of work.

The basics of the communication protocol are already published.  I'm guessing the rest of the E-Control code is for the GUI and the RTAS stuff…

I think there is some source code stored in the files section of the old Yahoo Group as well.

And speaking of web site audio generation, the Electro-Music guys have a bot that interacts with live performances…