Hello all, I recently bought into the Dubler Studio Kit and watched every single tutorial and have attempted to put Dubler to use in practice during music production workflow just two times so far—once for a melodic MIDI line and once for attempting to lay down a 4-instrument percussion rhythm via beatboxing.
As it is, the cost of the Dubler Studio Kit is not equivalent to the applicability of the performance. In other words, it didn’t go well and the purchase doesn’t feel worth it, yet. I of course am aware that half of that lack of performance rests on my shoulders as I will learn how to better utilize it and be a better “mouth musician” on my end for the microphone, but please don’t reply saying “it’s your fault our product is perfect” because it’s certainly not.
However I know with these types of products, the software and firmware are the other half of the improvement formula, so I’m joining the forums to ask:
Where can we pay attention to development updates/blogs/alpha or beta tests of improvements and of course make sure we get each improvement update on day one?
I don’t mind being an early adopter of a product that will (I assume) improve its algorithms, its software, its UI/UX, and its core usability over time, but I really hope Vochlea is on a beeline to improve recognition, filtering out flub notes, and etc ASAP because I did not need another microphone taking up space in my production area and was under the impression that buying the full-kit would give me significantly better tracking than just using the Dubler software with my own microphones. I know there’s a reduction in latency, but, I’m really hoping to get more out of the physical microphone I bought than a latency reduction. Through the software/firmware/etc. I hope to see more profiles for different applications (like a “vibrato singing profile starting point” or a “for poor singers profile starting point”) to reduce the need to 1. learn how to tweak every little parameter and why and 2. then have to tweak every little parameter to optimize for each use case.
I also hope to see the ability to rename drum tracks in the Dubler software. It blew my mind that you (i think) cannot yet do that. Tremendously confusing, setting up beatboxing profiles. Why can’t we just rename the cosmetic in-app name of each track? Drum 1, Drum 2, Drum 3, Drum 4, Drum, 5? What? Why? When they’re actually “Kick, Snare, Closed Hats, Open Hats, Claps, Crash” etc? Why on Earth can’t we change them?
And one last improvement suggestion would be a “time filter” that we could set to a certain duration of time cut-off threshold to dictate that the software would not output any tracking (midi notes/triggers) that are shorter than a certain duration of “on/off” so that, when melodic singing, “flub notes” (which are typically incredibly short in duration) would just go untriggered when a melodic part was slightly off pitch, sliding around more than the stickiness settings could keep under control, etc. Oh and, on the percussion side of things, something similar could be optionally applied to the “training” of each drum trigger where, if a user is noticing that the software is confusing two sounds that are actually very distinct from each other (like, say, a crash cymbal mouth sound triggering a kick drum or an open hi-hat), the user can have “4 circles” to teach Dubler what sounds should NOT trigger that specific drum sound (like, for a kick drum, teach it 8 kick drum mouth sounds, and then turn on a “teach it what NOT” feature, and then fill up 4 extra training nodes with the offending similar sound that causes it to mis-trigger, like in this case, the crash cymbal mouth sound or the open hat sound. Of course, there could be a simple “click the Drum Sound that the software is confusing this Drum Sound with so it knows to dig deeper into its recognition for a differentiation in the two trained sound profiles meant to trigger them independently” type of thing where a user could just click a “teach it NOT” activator and then click any of the offending Drum Sounds.
Anyways my main question was, where can we pay attention to software and firmware updates to get them ASAP and to ensure Vochlea is being proactive about developing updates so we can rest assured that this product isn’t just a “big marketing push to net sales and then move on within a year or two”? Sorry to sound cynical but I’ve seen boutique music gadget companies do this a lot and when the whole point of Dubler is to enable us to get usable results in sequencing MIDI with the mouth, this product really should have done more to ensure that can happen when the product arrives, and spent less time assuring us that it will get better when “we get better”