I’ve searched the web, Reddit’s TE and OP-XY subreddits, the OP forums, TE’s own OP-XY Full Guide, and even Synthdawg’s much larger OP-XY Notebook, and I still cannot figure out what Project → Config → General → Scene Length = Time Signature actually means. This option was introduced in the 1.1.0 firmware.
I can clearly reproduce the behavior of Scene Length = Longest and Scene Length = Shortest , but Scene Length = Time Signature behaves identically to Longest for me. What am I missing?
For reference, I created two scenes:
Scene 1 : one track, 1 bar long
Scene 2 : one track, 3 bars long
As expected:
With Longest (the default prior to 1.1.0), the song plays 1 bar for Scene 1 and 3 bars for Scene 2.
With Shortest , it plays 1 bar for Scene 1 and only the first bar of Scene 2.
However, when set to Time Signature , the behavior is the same as Longest .
Replying to myself after somebody on Reddit suggested an experiment.
WARNING: experimenting with “sequence length = time signature” might freeze your XY.
BAD news: I do not think this can be reliably experimented with. This isn’t just bugged; it appears to be leaking memory.
I’ve owned my XY for two months and use it almost daily. I had never seen it freeze before. While running these tests with “sequence length = time signature”, it froze twice tonight:
Once, it corrupted the selected drum preset (re-selecting it fixed it).
The second time, it froze the UI on the Project Config page, although the keyboard could still trigger sounds. I had to power-cycle the XY. When I turned it back on, it auto-loaded its previous state, which was now cursed, and the screen went completely black. Thankfully, I was able to press Project → Load blind and load the first factory project. I stopped the experiment there.
My test methodology (attempt at your own risk). If you attempt this yourself, I recommend the following:
Work on track 1 only.
Mute all other 15 tracks.
An empty track does count toward the 16-step minimum when determining the shortest track. That’s one thing I learned.
Create Scene 1 with 12 steps on track 1.
Tip: use a distinct sound on the first and last step, and a light drum sound in between.
Create Scene 2 with 6 steps, using a clone of track 1.
Create a Song with Scene 1 followed by Scene 2.
Set tempo to 40 BPM and manually count how many steps are played for each scene with Scene Length set to:
Longest
Shortest
Signature
Add 16 steps to track 1 and its clone (one additional page), bringing the totals to 28 and 22 steps.
Count again in all three Scene Length modes.
Add another 16 steps to both tracks (another page), bringing the totals to 44 and 38 steps.
Count again in all three modes.
I’m not including the data because the unit froze twice during testing, so the results can’t be considered reliable.
My gut feeling though is that in Time Signature mode, any page that is not completely full is ignored. Whether it has 1 step or 15 steps, it gets ditched.
In other words, an 18-step track will only play 16 steps. It complies exactly with the time signature, in that it will only play a multiple of 16 steps.
is there a very long holiday I am not aware of? I have been writing them since April about a serious track 5 & 6 detuning problem and the stopped responding. I’m starting to believe that this is just a toy and not a serious instrument like I thought it would be. It’s the first one that has ever really spoken to me and I flow on it and my musical ability to make music seems to just pour out of me but the technical hurdles crush that magic. any tips on getting them to talk?
Never had any issues, they’ve always gotten back to me pretty quick. If you’re reporting the same bugs multiple times maybe they already have it logged though.
If you’re willing to type out a description of the issue in a new thread, I’d be very curious to see what you’re running into on tracks 5 and 6. Of course I can’t actually fix the firmware but I’m always interested in different bugs and quirks.