What is Entrian Timeline's looped recording behaviour?

Hello there! I am a bit confused about the Entrian Timeline module and whether or not I should buy it now. I would like to have it synced to an external clock and record live polyphonic input from my MIDI-keyboard, can it do that? And if, can it also record in loops, overwriting the previously recorded loop or adding notes to it?

From the manual it seems that it does this, but I’m not sure if it does it for polyphonic input and/or looped.

OK it does record polyphonic input, just saw it in a video from VCVRackIdeas… so the question is then only how will it record looped?

When looping it adds notes.

@Richie

Thanks! It would be cool if it could switch between overwrite and add.

But from what it looks I think I will buy it, and then probably immediately add a feature request :slight_smile: Or two… I already have another one in mind, which would be an asyncronous looping mode, meaning having patterns of different lengths that all loop at their own end, creating polyrhythmic/polymetric stuff. If it can’t already do that. Can it?

Agreed.

Not presently as far as I’m aware.

As premium modules go it’s a very good one, enjoy :slight_smile:

Hi! I’m the author of Entrian Timeline.

Yes, Timeline will add notes when doing looped recording. There’s no option to clear existing notes on loop, but feature requests are welcome! Please use the Issue Tracker at GitHub - EntrianAudio/Rack

In the meantime, there’s a Clear button on the panel that can be mapped to a MIDI button on your controller, so you could use the additive behaviour while that made sense, and then hit a button on your controller to clear the notes:

Timeline can’t give you different playhead positions per track, but you could use multiple instances of the included Entrian Melody module to achieve the same thing, by giving each one a different length. Here’s a pair of them, one set to an eight-beat length and the other to a six-beat length:

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Hi! Thank You! I just bought it now and am checking it out!

There is one thing that bothers me: When I try to record very short notes it always sets them to a longer length, although I can shorten them afterwards

On Melody it seems fine, but on timeline theres a minimum length of a quarter note

That could be because of auto-quantisation, which is enabled by default - try disabling it or setting it to a greater number of steps per beat.

It always does this, even when quantization is off… the start of the notes are unquantized but the length is always at least one full step of the grid… on Melody the minimum length is a quarter of a grid step, which is OK, but could be even shorter, since I can shorten them afterwards to an even smaller grid, so I guess it’s a bug on Timeline? Or on both, but with different minimum lengths?

I’m not seeing a difference between Timeline and Melody, and both will record notes down to about one sixteenth of a beat, which I suspect is the limit of my controller. :slight_smile:

Rather than turn this thread into a tech support conversation, would you mind sending me a direct message with your patch attached? Thanks!

You can also copy from Entrian and paste into our 4X4 which can hold 16 full sequences. Note data only, however, no controller data.

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Oh that’s cool! Thank you for pointing that out!

And thank you Richie, I will report back soon to you, probably tomorrow.

Yeah, we worked with Entrian and Impromptu to make copy/paste work together.

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I can’t reproduce it right now, so I think I was just clocking it too slow and everything is fine with them.

Great! I’m glad to hear it’s working properly for you.

In the meantime I had the problem again, but I figured out how to avoid it: The VCV MIDI-CV module is on polyphony mode “rotate” by default, this causes the Entrian sequencers to sometimes not play back notes during recording correctly and makes some notes too long.

So here’s two tips for Entrian users:

If you connect it to the MIDI-CV module, set it to polyphony mode “reuse” and everything works as expected.

Also, you should check that Note and Gate arrive at the same time, so if I send the notes through a Quantizer and offset first, I delay the Gate for 2 samples, using a VCV Mutes module.

So far I’m really happy with it. I was missing the option to just play in some notes for a long time, so I should have bought this much earlier… :slight_smile: It’s a great module and very user friendly.

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