Elektron Machinedrum Gets Unofficial Firmware Update

The Machinedrum, one of Elektron‘s retired instruments, is getting new life, with an unofficial firmware update.

Machinedrum SPS1-UW OS 1.71 is intended to fix outstanding bugs and enhance the device’s MIDI support.

Here’s what developers v-yadli and JustinValer have to say about it:

The improvements to the MIDI spec allow for better integration with attached MIDI devices, such as the MegaCommand.

For those unfamiliar, the MegaCommand is a small, open hardware MIDI controller that provides the MD with modern sequencer capabilities and other great features.

The developers note that they are not affiliated with Elektron.

If you’ve used the unofficial Machinedrum firmware, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!

12 thoughts on “Elektron Machinedrum Gets Unofficial Firmware Update

  1. > Elektron Machinedrum Gets Unofficial Firmware Update

    the worst thing that could happen to a company. example: vailixi 3.5 by mansell-labs for akai´s mpc 3k. a guy from australia outperformed roger linn´s original sequencer (!) firmware! embarrassing, to put it mildy. same for jjos for the later akai models.

    1. The MD is a legend, as is evidenced by the fact that a) people are still using it 20 years later and b) someone loves the thing so much they are willing to hack it and improve the OS. Your viewpoint is flat out wrong.

  2. A shame that Elektron choose to abandon Machinedrum 🙂

    People have asked for updates for years, but Elektron has basically ignored their end-users, though the wishlist was long…

      1. Same here, since the Octatrack got conditional trigs in an update I’d hope that the same would be possible for the Machinedrum. I don’t think they will update it though, at least not until an MK3 is released, if ever. In the meantime you can sort of get conditional trigs by using the LFOs, to do this you need to direct a square wave LFO to a track’s volume parameter and a random LFO to that square wave LFOs speed. The square wave LFO needs to be on a higher track number than the random LFO modulator in order for this to work. This is only really useful for random probability trigs, and of course you need to sacrifice two LFOs for a single track.

    1. Machinedrum has been out nearly 20 years. Plenty of synths out there that aren’t being supported by their original companies for two decades.

      1. You mean all synths. Typical OS support for new devices in far less than ten years. You’d be lucky to find a company that puts 4 or 5 years into OS or dev support. Elektron are the exception to this.

  3. i really admire people with the skills to script / code OSs for older machines and breath new life in to them, well done guys.

  4. The machine is really old.
    If you look at the competition at the time (electribe, quasimidi), the device was way ahead of its time.
    To make today’s claims is very arrogant.

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