RECEPTOR 2 Version 1.8 System Software Update -Public Beta

[Balda]

Hi there

Unfortunately, it is not a matter of cloning. The V1.7 and V1.8 software versions are radically different in file structure, permissions, and a ton of other stuff. We spent many months trying to do incremental installs that would allow you to simply patch and replace the existing structure of 1.7, but the results were not always perfect and we decided that the best way to ensure that the update to 1.8 happens successfully is to reformat and reinstall the drive.

For the time being, we are going to be offering a low cost drive purchase program so that you can swap out your old drive with the new one. The new one will be higher performance (its SATA) and we will offer it in several configurations so if you already own Komplete 5, for example, you won't have to reinstall it.

Details are forthcoming on this program, but it should happen very soon after we release the 1.8 update. We have looked at ways that you can reformat and update your unit in the field, but we are concerned that some customers (obviously not any of you!) would not be aware that it is going to blow away all the data on their drive and thus create a support problem. So until we can come up with a way that ensures successful field reformatting updates, we are going to just offer drive replacement.

I know this will make some of you angry, but for right now we think it is the best solution available to us.

Thanks for your understanding!

Groovology

Hi,
thanks for reply. And what about SurfacePattern's idea - ISO install images? It is maybe better way for customers. Don't you think?

[Kermit Jagger]

I vote for an ISO image that can be used to overwrite a drive.

Buying a drive from the US, considering the initial cost plus shipping and customs fees is not appealling to me.

[johnrule]

+1 ISO

JR

[Bryan@MuseResearch]

+1 ISO

JR

Hi John (and Kermit)

Our current thinking is that an ISO image reformat method, although convenient, is also rife with problems. Although everyone on this forum is pretty technical, there are plenty of customers who will insert the disc,(or plugin the thumb drive) click okay a bunch of time to get rid of those annoyingly informative screens that explain what is going to happen, only to successfully reform and update their drives. A while later, when they realize they will have NO PLUGINS INSTALLED they will call us and start comment on our mother's shoewear... or worse, like saying rude things about my dog. And of course as luck would have it they'll have an important gig that night as well!

I know none of you would have that problem, but we have a lot of customers who aren't particularly technical, which is great because we do see Receptor as a way to allow people to run plugins without having to be real computer savvy... When we put ourselves in their shoes, say having bought a Receptor with Komplete inside, and then running the software updater, only to find Komplete was no longer there, you'd be rather miffed... This update is a _complete reformat_. No data will remain on the drive, and no matter how many times you say that to people, there will be some, probably drummers like myself, who won't read the screens (hard to make out lettering underneath all that drool) and be very unhappily surprised to find that their Receptor is now completely updated and also deafeningly mute.

As a result, our CEO and Chairman think that the drive swap, or an upgrade, or even a trade in is the best way to go.

We might be able to have an iso image updater that we gave to certain people, but we would need to confirm that they knew exactly what was going to happen, which is their Receptor will get updated and all plugins will get tossed overboard...

I want to say I really appreciate you all giving your opinions, this is helpful to us and I wish that a complete reformat wasn't necessary, but it is, so we are trying our best to deal with it. Thanks for your understanding.

Groovology

[johnrule]

We might be able to have an iso image updater that we gave to certain people, but we would need to confirm that they knew exactly what was going to happen, which is their Receptor will get updated and all plugins will get tossed overboard...

I can appreciate your position...the Receptor attracts users who know very little about the internal workings of their hardware and software, and it also attracts users who are very adept. You need to please both, and by pleasing only the novice, you shun the latter.

I'm feeling pretty 'shunned' right now

Do you honestly think that anyone who goes to the trouble of opening up their Receptor, pulling out the IDE hard drive, installing a SATA drive, and then connecting a CD/DVD IDE drive for the OS install is going to 'accidentally' do something? As far as your "thumb drive" concern, I don't think the bios would even let you start up from a thumb drive on the REV C, correct?

As a suggestion, release the ISO via a non-disclosure and an agreement of non-liability...

I'll do the rest

JR

[richwhite9]

I'm guessing this is the last real update to Rev Cs? No?

As such I can see the drive purchase approach w/preloaded software configs as a winner. It covers many backup issues for a long time to come and is a reasonable closure to one of the biggest complaints about the Cs--the lack of a decent backup strategy.

As a long time MSDN and Oracle Developer Member I'm used to downloading ISOs. and VM images and loading up a virtual DVD driver and trashing drives to play with Beta releases. You're right. The drive purchase or drive upgrade option w/preloaded software hits the critical issues. I too would like to see the ISO option at some point but it's less critical to me than the drive purchase or upgrade option and having the larger sample libraries and finicky installs preloaded.

[Kermit Jagger]

I'm with JR on this. Signing a waiver of some sort before downloading the ISO is a good way to insure users know what they're doing.

As for the "no plugins" installed option / mute Receptor problem, I don't see why the ISO shouldn't already contain the bog standard plugs that are delivered when buying the machine new. So overwriting the drive with OS 1.8 should at least give you a machine ready to play.

As for the rest, what's wrong with reusing the plugin packages that are available on plugorama unless they no longer work with version 1.8 ? At the end of the day, users have to learn how to install plugins.

Maybe the solution is an ISO for whoever requests it as opposed to ready to download package, with the proviso that Muse will not fix bad updates for free.

[Robert Karasek]

For owners of the older/Rev C platform, is the hard drive swap a one time thing or will we have to do this each time there is an os update? Also how long does Muse project supporting the older platform with os updates?

Jon

any new statements on that ?

[SurfacePatterns]

We might be able to have an iso image updater that we gave to certain people, but we would need to confirm that they knew exactly what was going to happen, which is their Receptor will get updated and all plugins will get tossed overboard...

I can appreciate your position...the Receptor attracts users who know very little about the internal workings of their hardware and software, and it also attracts users who are very adept. You need to please both, and by pleasing only the novice, you shun the latter.

I'm feeling pretty 'shunned' right now

I feel the same way. There is absolutely no reason that I should have to pay Muse Research to install a new hard drive with the new operating system on my Receptor when I have the ability to read instructions and do it myself from my own home.

I think Muse Research should think about embracing its tech-savvy Receptor users instead of treating them like the lowest common denominator.

As a suggestion, release the ISO via a non-disclosure and an agreement of non-liability...

+1.

Muse Research has a potentially valuable resource in its tech-savvy users that it's not currently utilizing. For example, every tech-savvy user with a Rev. C Receptor that's contributed to this thread could be beta-testing the 1.8 OS on their Rev. C Receptors _right now_ if Muse Research had previously decided to use their tech-savvy users as the valuable resource that they are.

Think about it.

[SurfacePatterns]

Our current thinking is that an ISO image reformat method, although convenient, is also rife with problems. Although everyone on this forum is pretty technical, there are plenty of customers who will insert the disc,(or plugin the thumb drive) click okay a bunch of time to get rid of those annoyingly informative screens that explain what is going to happen, only to successfully reform and update their drives. A while later, when they realize they will have NO PLUGINS INSTALLED they will call us and start comment on our mother's shoewear... or worse, like saying rude things about my dog. And of course as luck would have it they'll have an important gig that night as well!

I don't know much about how the file system is arranged on the Muse Receptor (I'll install 'ssh' and look around at some point), but I do know a great deal about Linux. I was thinking last night about the problem of losing all your plugins when updating the operating system, and my mind kept coming back to one simple question:

Why isn't the '.wine' directory (or the home directory containing the '.wine' directory) mounted on a different partition than the file system root?

For those of you that aren't Linux-savvy:

1.) Any directory on a Linux-based file system can be mounted on a separate partition.
2.) When you reinstall/upgrade your operating system, you can choose to format certain partitions without formatting other partitions.
3.) The '.wine' directory contains the Windows file system, registry, etc..
4.) It is _very_ common for users to mount their '/home' directories (directories that contain user-specific data) on a separate partition so that future OS upgrades/installs don't require you to move all of your data to separate storage before installing/upgrading.

If the '.wine' directory was on a separate partition, then everything else on the drive could be reformatted, and the plugins, samples, etc. would be completely safe.

Obviously, there's nothing you can do about this for your Rev. C users, but this is something you should implement in the future.

[johnrule]

I say plan on starting over and avoid the problem entirely. It could take a day or two to get things back to normal, but you will have a fresh system. In fact, you may not install half of the plugins that you have (because you never use them), and it will go much faster than you think...

JR

[Bryan@MuseResearch]

I'm guessing this is the last real update to Rev Cs? No?

As such I can see the drive purchase approach w/preloaded software configs as a winner. It covers many backup issues for a long time to come and is a reasonable closure to one of the biggest complaints about the Cs--the lack of a decent backup strategy.

As a long time MSDN and Oracle Developer Member I'm used to downloading ISOs. and VM images and loading up a virtual DVD driver and trashing drives to play with Beta releases. You're right. The drive purchase or drive upgrade option w/preloaded software hits the critical issues. I too would like to see the ISO option at some point but it's less critical to me than the drive purchase or upgrade option and having the larger sample libraries and finicky installs preloaded.

Not at all! Rev Cs will continue to be updated but ONLY when the 1.8 software is installed, since that is the new OS platform upon which we will proceed from here.

I completely understand those of you who think an ISO reformat is no big deal. I will discuss it with others in engineering to see if this is something we could do for those who were willing to sign a liability waver so you can do what you wish. However, there is something a bit more practical at play here, and that is the fact that reformatting and ending up with a Receptor that has no sounds in it at all is a terrible customer experience, and we aren't very excited about the prospect of people completely clearing their drive and then not having any sounds when they turn it on again. I know you computer guys completely understand what is going on, and you'd be willing to deal with it, but it is kinda against the whole spirit of Receptor as a music instrument. Although I guess its not too different than completely reformatting the drive in a sampler... that too can't make sounds until all the samples are reloaded...

Anyway, I will bring it up and we'll see if I can't convince everyone that this is something we should offer those who really really want it.

To get back to your original question: Rev Cs are still completely viable. We do recommend upgrading, and we intend to offer yet another special program for Rev C owners who might want to upgrade simply so you can benefit from the faster performance of the newer hardware, but I still use a Rev C on a regular basis!

Cheers

Groovology

[johnrule]

but it is kinda against the whole spirit of Receptor as a music instrument.

That's subjective. This also goes contrary to what you mentioned earlier in regards to an ISO image approach:

"we've thought about that a lot, and that in fact may be the best way to go."

What happened to that "spirit"?

JR

[Bryan@MuseResearch]

but it is kinda against the whole spirit of Receptor as a music instrument.

That's subjective. This also goes contrary to what you mentioned earlier in regards to an ISO image approach:

"we've thought about that a lot, and that in fact may be the best way to go."

What happened to that "spirit"?

JR

"Spirit" tends to get tempered when you discuss the legal ramifications of blitzing someone's drive and rendering their "instrument" a "doorstop". Very capable doorstop with additional effort, but the guys in tech support are REALLY concerned that if we go with the ISO image approach, SOMEONE won't realize that they are erasing everything on their drive and requiring a bunch of software installation to make it usable again.

Like I said, I know that none of you would do that, but there are a number of people who think that Receptor should be able to run 16 instantiations of Ivory, Kontkat, and Omnisphere with 1000s of notes of polyphony with no problem, since it has 16 slots. Even after explaining to them that NO computer can do that, they still insist that the product is "broken" because it can't replace 8 computers... All I can say to that kind of thing is SIGH. Make that HEAVY SIGH...

let me ask to you this: how many of you would be willing to run an updater from the command line?

Groovology

[buscemi]

let me ask to you this: how many of you would be willing to run an updater from the command line?

*raises hand*