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IMHO, the manuals are fine. Just read them carefully, & press the buttons! I also find stage to be a great asset. The video tutorials are
great & I look forward to the ipad version of stage. Workbench sounds
excellent too. All this support is awesome. If you don't think so......
try getting this level of support for a monome / tenori-on or windsynth.

Calm down y'all and just play.

Best, tefman3d

PS - ever tried to read and understand an old roland manual?

First- i am not the enemy. I am very pro Eigenharp. I do not want to see it "die on the vine" because it is too difficult for first time users to use and understand. I do not think that most musicians can or want to learn a sort of programming language such as Belcanto or Eigen D. They will become frustrated and give up on this wonderful instrument. Can one imagine where computers would be today if we all still had to use command line interfaces rather than GUIs ? (Osx, Win7 & et al)
MY software that came with my Alpha (4 days ago) does not have Stage at all.
How do I get this part of the softrware?
Again--- I am only trying to help make this a better experience for a larger group of users!

"quote
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written by: Tenebrous
Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:58:35 +0000 GMT
As an iPad owner I'm very excited by this :) Please add me to the list of testers if you have a space :)"
Me too i'm a new user of pico
Guillaume

You probably haven't noticed but our documentation has been developing continuously over the last year or so and is now getting fairly complete. We've done some work on the website and you can now see that this is also versioned (link at the top), so one will be able to access older releases if that's what you are using. You will also see that our newest part of EigenD, Stage, has extensive tooltips and help (which is in fact drawn automatically from the Wiki when the software is built).

We will not be producing a printed reference and have decided that the Wiki is where it will all be happening in the future - this seems a more sensible decision to me as it can be searched, versioned and generally kept up to date far more easily. If you have suggestions for improving the content or organisation of this we'd love to hear them. And please feel free to contribute if you have the time..

John

John,
Seems to me that we are in a rut here. Some of us want easier to use docs about our instruments. Eigen labs response is to keep saying what we have on the web site is fine. Though what is on the web site have been updated it is still difficult and disorganized for many of us.
In just a few minutes on the clubhouse last Monday I learned more from Geert than months of trying to understand Belcanto from the web site info.
I wish there was a whole system overview that showed how all the pieces were connected.
Also a pdf document written for us non programmer types would be nice and could be updated as needed and no printing costs,
My impression is that most reference is for those who already understand the system not for new comers.
From my years of experience with complex systems I know that better docs could be made.
I think that most musicians want an instrument that is easier to use and learn than what the Eigenharp is now. I do not know what your market model and plans are but my guess is that having the Eigenharp only appeal to software developers and other super techno types is very small market and a loss to the musical world.

I think you're probably right Mike, information is spread around in the Wiki and the reference now looks stark by comparison - it was never intended to be a tutorial, more a factual source. A bit of reorganising, editing and a few pages of words could probably produce a more friendly read.

I would add a caveat to this discussion here, to address Larry's point about an overview of the system; We have been working hard behind the scenes on our new product Workbench and the supporting 2.0 release, which in many respects is quite different to the 1.X series. Not to players, but for this audience, who want to tinker, any documentation about the system written for 1.3 or 1.4 would be seriously out of date before Christmas. Workbench makes written documentation about the signal flow fairly pointless as it makes the whole environment visually very discoverable for a power user, without the need for Belcanto. In the same way that Stage has transformed the user experience for non technical players, we think Workbench will do for people who want to build their own custom setups. I really don't want to be spending rare resources documenting a process that currently requires Belcanto and an in depth understanding of the system when that very approach is about to be rendered partly obsolete by new tools.

On that note, I'll be making an announcement about our upcoming release schedule, 2.0, new products (including Workbench) and pricing for those very shortly, so watch this space.

John

PS - Larry, if you have a 'wishlist' of things you'd like documented please post it, and we can all argue about it, and as and when we can find resources we can tick things off. Or anyone who feels able can chip in...

Even though I am now working for Eigenlabs, as a user I do have to chime in here, since I was a regular user for almost a year before.

@Carvingcode I simply don't agree with you. There's a wealth of user documentation, a huge amount, in various forms ... even detailed video tutorials. I was thoroughly impressed by it when I bought my Pico. On top of that Eigenlabs has always been incredibly responsive and helpful with answering questions. It got me playing and composing songs on the Pico in a matter of days when I got it in December 2009. There's much more and better documentation now even. However, it seems that you're complaining that the current documentation doesn't *suit you*. Well, that has been the case with a lot of products I bought. Most instruments I got never even had any meaningful documentation to speak of (none of my guitars say how they're wired up inside, my continuum doesn't say how to add new sounds nor how to customize its factory features, the manual of my guitar to MIDI convertor is incomprehensible, it's taken years for my audio interface maker to consolidate their documentation into a comprehensive manual, ...).

In time, if a product has enough traction and there's enough demand, this is usually something that is solved by a variety of 3rd party training companies, book writers, teachers, ... that create their own approach that might suit you better. Maybe in time this will come for the Eigenharp, maybe not. In the meantime there's a great community here of people that are totally willing to help out. We (the users) have even started a virtual clubhouse to share experiences or help each other. But honestly, did you really expect to be able to pick up a new instrument without having to spend real time to learn it? The Eigenharp is not a controller that you're supposed to be able to pick up in a matter of minutes using existing skill, there's no substitute for time spent with it. This is what makes is so great in my opinion since you really have this unique, wonderfully expressive electronic instrument that requires its own techniques and habits. However, everyone I speak with that has taken some time says that it's an incredibly smooth learning curve, more so than any other instrument they've learned provided that you don't try to turn it into something it is not. If you do opt for using it totally differently than what's considered the 'happy path' and explained in the reference guide, then you're going to spend a lot of time and effort, but that only seems normal. It's impossible to create step by step tutorials for every possible and imaginable use that someone might have for the Eigenharp. In other words, if you don't want to stumble, don't run before you can walk.

About Windows stability, have you tried the latest drivers and releases? We've been steadily working on it for more than a year and thanks to user feedback it has grown much more stable. We haven't had a Windows-related bug report in quite a while. The last problem you reported was from January this year, that's eight months ago. If you still find it doesn't work well enough, why haven't you spoken up during those eight months when you saw the new releases coming out? You know we react almost instantly and try to figure out what might be going on, with a fix coming as soon as possible. Does it have warts, yes, are there bugs, yes, are you left in the cold when you contact support, no!

Finally, and I do have to get this off of my chest even if it might be considered bad form. Stop complaining about the price. I've personally spent quite some quality time with other instrument builders, including Roger Linn who does know a thing or two about creating real instruments. None of them can believe how it's possible to build and sell the Eigenharp for as little as they sell now. That's right, they consider it a bargain, even the Alpha. It's not a cheap piece of molded plastic reusing whatever knobs and keys that have been mass produced for years. Everything is new and extremely sturdily built, even the musical information has been invented from scratch, it's what sets apart the Eigenharp, but it has a price.

Best regards,

Geert

Hi Mark,

I fail to see your point, the Pico has been working out of the box almost from the get-go. The first two or three releases had show stopper issues that were quickly resolved, I vividly remember them since I was frustrated about them as a player in 2009. Ever since then all advertised functionalities of the factory setups have been working. Yes, as with any software product some people experienced bugs and issues, they were solved as they were encountered, as with many software products. There were some wrinkles and annoyances in the first releases that could easily be worked around. More importantly though, there were major feature improvements and additions added to the software for free in the last year (like the routing matrix and Stage) to make things easier for users alongside the usual bug fixing and performance improvements.

About stepping on stage, Dino Soldo has been touring with Leonard Cohen during a large part of 2010 with his Eigenharp. I've been touring through France and now with my band in Belgium, Antonio has played it outside in a medieval castle with a dance company, Dragica just did her first gig last night, Dave has been playing it together with a circus, BangStrokeBlow does regular London gigs, and so on ... I'm personally also using other instruments on stage, like the guitar and keyboards and I have to do just as much (if not more) tweaking and testing for those to be crackle and issue free with software instruments. A large part is related to the computer configuration and instruments you choose. You do realize that AU, VSTs, OSs, audio interfaces, drivers, all have a pile of bugs and issues? Getting them to work together is challenging, it's one of the reasons why some people just output MIDI and work with hardware gear.

Take care,

Geert

Hi Mark

We are going to be charging for 2.0, but if you don't want to pay for it you really don't need to as 1.4 will remain free. There's also the open source release, which is totally free, as in free for ever, which will continue to track 2.0, just later and with slightly less in the way of new features.

1.4 is pretty reliable by any software standard - we have only a tiny number of outstanding bugs on it at the moment (all of which are related, inevitably, to 3rd party AU and VSt products breaking things) which will get fixed before it goes into Stable. We haven't made a Stable release with a known 'showstopper' bug (one that can mess up a live performance) for well over a year in fact, so I'm not really sure why you're uncomfortable using it live, lots of people are doing so, regularly. If you are having specific reliability problems, please let us know by using the bug reporter as soon as possible - we can't fix them if we don't know about them.

Regarding Workbench, you are quite correct I spoke about this not long after launch. There are two things about this - firstly I do not believe that I have ever said that it would be free, and secondly I would like to give you a little context regarding the developments of our UI over the intervening time. Firstly, the 'Workbench' that I was talking about in 2009 is not the 'Workbench' we are releasing now, it was a totally different animal. We had a working prototype of that in late 2009 and it combined a graphical view of the system with the Belcanto command line to enable configuration. It was written In Python/WX (for the technically minded). It was not pretty, but it was functional. The first six months after the Pico was shipped proved very interesting for us as we got a lot of feedback. One of the major themes was that people wanted a more traditional GUI and in hand with that there was a giant chorus of howling about the use of a command language - a small minority love it, a wide majority hated it. This caused a considerable amount of thinking and discussion here, and the decision was taken to split what was originally 'Workbench' into two different tools. These became what are now Stage and the new Workbench. Stage was envisioned as a powerful, configurable, network control center for EigenD, something that enabled the control and manipulation of the system in real time in live environments. I think we achieved this and in 1.3 Stage is now part of a formal release, one that no-one has been asked to pay for.

In addition, a great many of the configuration and control parameters for working with MIDI and DAW's that people asked for have now been integrated in our main GUI in the MIDI matrix, a very flexible tool for this. This also takes on part of what was possible with the original Workbench, but in a very discoverable and easy to use manner. This is also present in both the 1.4 release (which is freely available) and the open source release, which is as freely available as it is humanly possible to make it.

The remaining parts of Workbench, the building of setups from scratch in a graphical manner, has proved very difficult to implement. It's a genuinely tough problem to solve well, and has required both a lot of work on a GUI and some serious and technically challenging changes to the underlying system to support it. It has also been very expensive to develop and has taken five times longer than I thought it would. It is not something I am prepared to give away at the moment - in the past year we have put literally several millions pounds worth of software in the public domain (software that I personally paid for incidentally), for free, and I don't think it reasonable of people to ask us to continue to give our work away forever just because we have done so lot already. Its like punishing someone for being nice, why do that?

People have to have incomes, including the Eigenlabs development team, and much as I admire Richard Stallman there is only so much beard that one can eat before even McDonald's starts to look good. If you really want to never pay for software I encourage you to contribute to the open source release and make it happen.

On a related note, I would just like to make everyone aware that however much you might imagine it so, the profit margin on Eigenharp sales does not actually pay for EigenD development. It doesn't actually come close - the development of EigenD is effectively funded personally by me and several other investors. I do think that it is now appropriate, after two years of free releases, significant new functionality (Stage, MIDI routing etc) that the community be asked to contribute towards this. It is even possible, at some distant point, that the software may begin to break even, at which point it will have a real long term future independent of benefactors. I would very much like to see this happen, as I am sure other members of the Eigenharp community would. It won't though unless people are prepared to contribute either in coding or cash.


John

I haven't bothered at all with the Eigenharp in recent months and in fact I am vaguely sorry I ever bought it, even though I think it has incredible potential.

Frankly, from my perspective the software has been terrible as is the documentation. It may very well be true that there is now "lots of documentation", but you have to be an library archival specialist to wade through the stuff just to find out what you need to find out! It is incredibly difficult to "discover" both what can be done and how to do it.

(a) Plenty of documentation does not substitute for good documentation and (b) Good documentation is not a substitute for poor software.

When was the last time anyone read the documentation for their softsynths, MS Word, DAW, etc.....at most, one occasionally looks something up, but for the most part, it should be quite obvious how things are supposed to work.

It's certainly distressting to see that one will have to pay for upgraded software when the initial software was, candidly, not very good. Specially after putting out about $7,000 to buy the instrument and more to integrate the base unit into my live performance rig. While I sympathize completely with John's investment concern (been there!), in some ways, that just doesn't matter. It's almost like the recent Netfix "apology".

It's going to be very hard to grow the customer base if the existing customers are unhappy. And I'm unhappy!

I don't know why it is so hard to develop good software for the Eigenharp --- I've thought of numerous kinds of front-end environments that would make it a pleasure to work with the Eigenharp but it seems that Eigenlabs is locked into a design approach that is, frankly, cute as an idea (i.e, Belcanto) but useless for most practical purposes (i.e. people who just want to play).


At this point, what I'd love to see is a simple API/SDK that takes the raw datastream coming through USB from the Eigenharp and makes that data available directly to applications. On top of that, for experimentalists, I'd like to see a couple of Max externals that essentially do for the Eigenharp what the [midiin] object family does for MIDI.

There could be a MIDI mode and an OSC mode where the latter is important and that's it. No built-in soft synths, arpegiators, drums, sequencers, etc.....there are plenty of very mature software apps and plugins to do that stuff.

Focus on the Eigenharp as a fabulous PHYSICAL expressive controller interface. Don't ruin it by locking us into a software model that is not appropriate for many people.

Please!


If that's not going to happen, I offer a gorgeous Eigenharp Alpha for sale at a (sadly) significantly discounted price.

Sigh