Changelog

What arrived, and when. Dates are the day the work landed on the instrument — nothing appears here until it is running on the rig.

One line per change, newest first. How a feature actually behaves belongs on its own page: The surface, Generating patterns, Mixing and effects, Modulation, Performing, Saving.

Unreleased

In the repository and passing its tests; not yet played at the instrument.

Added

  • Every bank is saved in the snapshot, and a set returns on the bank it was saved on.
  • The top line marks itself when it has been cut short.

Changed

  • The screens redraw in strips instead of whole, so moving one number costs one strip.
  • Three modulation rates were removed — too slow to come out as a shape.
  • The daemon’s web editor and its own sequencer are gone, and with them an unauthenticated network socket.

Fixed

  • MELODY and RHYTHM on a voice you recorded or loaded with chords no longer wipe it: they move and drop the steps that are there instead of rebuilding the channel one note at a time. MELODY moves the whole take together, so a written progression keeps its shape.
  • Installing on a clean ZynthianOS builds the daemon again. Debian’s cargo is 1.65, which cannot read the repository’s lock file, so both installers now put a current toolchain in place from rustup before the build — reported from a fresh Pi 4 install.
  • A knob that cannot reach its plugin says so instead of moving a number.
  • A tap you played is no longer swallowed by the machine writing at the same moment.
  • The snapshot tools cannot leave a half-written snapshot behind.
  • LENGTH says which of its two meanings it is showing — beats on a drum, register bits on a voice — including under the lens.
  • HITS says when a rhythm register is thinning the line.
  • A step you erase with ERASE stays erased.
  • Switching banks on a kind-switched channel no longer kills the panel.
  • Banks you visited can no longer play over the set you just loaded.
  • The eight encoders stop lurching four times a revolution.
  • A played drum step keeps its colour across a reload, and a tap no longer takes it off a recording.
  • The key stops walking when every voice is locked.
  • A greyed knob records why in the session log.
  • The preset name comes back after a snapshot load. A voice whose chain had no presets to step through kept that verdict for the rest of the session, so its preset name stayed off the screen through every set you loaded afterwards while every other knob on the page still changed the sound.
  • On an instrument with no voices, a key change no longer leaves ROOT and SCALE in brackets for the rest of the session — and switching your last voice to a drum while a key change is waiting now lands it instead of stranding it.

9 October 2026

Added

  • Five dub techno pieces that are not one bar looping. The drums keep a one-bar groove but run a phrase of two, three or four bars with a fill on the last bar, while the chords and bass loop over two or four bars — so a four-bar progression under a three-bar drum phrase only lines up again every twelve bars. Start them with PLAY on the Maschine: the phrase clock begins there, and a set started from the touchscreen plays every bar plain. They are 253 to 257 in snapshot/dub-phrases/; copy them to your snapshot bank and load them from the touchscreen.

1 October 2026

Added

  • Twelve more dub techno pieces, in places the first twenty did not go. A bass and pad with a gap of a full octave kept between them, an echo built around the dotted eighth, two pad layers instead of a stab, four loop lengths stacked at once, a track of nothing but quiet ghost notes, a bass that carries the pulse with no kick at all, and scales the first twenty never used — blues, a five-note Japanese scale and phrygian dominant. Like the first twenty, nothing in them moves at random. They are not installed and none of them is the default; copy them from snapshot/dub-round-3/ and load them from the touchscreen.
  • The Maschine’s MIDI OUT socket plays what the instrument plays. Every channel’s notes — the ones the generator writes and the ones you play on the pads, together — also leave by the five-pin socket on the back, one cable carrying channels 1 to 8. Do not run a cable from the OUT socket to the IN socket: IN feeds every channel, so the notes would come straight back out.

12 September 2026

Added

  • CHORD can drift: bind MOD to it on a voice and the chord changes shape once a bar.
  • ARM can repeat a macro: tap it twice and it lands every two lengths until you cancel it.
  • Every modulator on one channel clears in a single gesture — hold MOD and ERASE and press that channel’s Group button. The other seven channels keep theirs.
  • Twenty dub techno pieces to choose between. Not twenty mixes of one bar — twenty different tracks. Each has its own tempo, key, groove and drum pattern, its own bass line and chord progression, and its own room and echo. Some loop every bar, some every two, some every four; one swings, one is in triplets, one has no four–on–the–floor at all. Nothing in any of them moves at random, so each one plays the same way every time. They are not installed and none of them is the default; copy them from snapshot/dub-round/ and load them from the touchscreen.

Fixed

  • A voice whose chain has no bank chosen yet no longer says its preset knob cannot move. It was drawn greyed — the instrument’s way of saying a control cannot act — over an engine whose presets were sitting on disk the whole time, which is what two of the three voices in the shipped house set do. A chain whose bank really is empty still greys out, because there the knob really cannot move.

8 September 2026

Added

  • HUMAN and HUMNV — the machine stops playing perfectly. HUMAN nudges each note’s timing at random, HUMNV its velocity, both per channel. The knob is scaled so it breathes at about a third of the way up and its top is the loosest anyone would want — judged on a four–on–the–floor kick. Read
  • Nine more scales, taking SCALE to fifteen positions: PHRMJ, WHOLE, DIM7, BLUES, JAPAN, IWATO, PELOG, BALI and HUNG. DIM7 has four notes and arpeggiates rather than sounding like a key. Read

Changed

  • The panel goes dark with the screen and stays dark, and any press brings the whole surface back at once. Playing keeps it awake, and the music never stops while it sleeps. Read
  • The touchscreen pattern editor’s keymap now follows the surface’s own ROOT and SCALE, instead of showing whatever it last set.
  • A fader moved on the touchscreen reaches the MK2’s button lights at once, rather than up to a fifth of a second later.
  • A hit played late keeps the timing you played it with, so quantising a take is no longer one–way. Nothing sounds different today: the grid still wins until a control for it exists.

7 September 2026

Changed

  • Plugin GUIs are off by default, which gives back about three quarters of a processor core per modulated effect. The Zynthian UI’s own remote screen on :6080 is unaffected; only the plugins’ own screens on :6081 go. maschine-plugin-guis.sh on brings them back at that price — the numbers.
  • The install now lives at /opt/technomaschine and the daemon runs as the zynthian user rather than as root. Read

6 September 2026

Changed

  • The instrument boots into a piece of music: the factory snapshot is 019-dub-factory, and its main fader ships at 28 because 100 clipped.
  • Every preset is sent to its own room — each of the seventy-one now writes its own reverb and delay sends instead of leaving them to the plugin.
  • A snapshot carries the reverb’s size and character and the delay’s feedback, so loading a preset brings its room with it.
  • The page ring answers more than twice as fast, draws only the page you stop on, and costs about a sixth of the traffic.

Fixed

  • REVERB and DELAY show what the effect is actually doing, and find whichever effect is loaded.
  • The CUTOFF knob works while a squeezed filter is still fading back — it was dead for one to two seconds.
  • A squeezed pad no longer holds the filter open for good.
  • The white block that flashed over a panel column is gone, and two screen rows that were never cleared are cleared.
  • Loading a preset puts your channels back the way the preset wants them, kind switches included.
  • The MOD rate pads are readable, and the MOD pad menu looks inert when it is inert.
  • 1/16T says it is a triplet instead of drawing as 1/16.
  • Pulling the USB cable and putting it back repaints the whole surface — measured at last, not just claimed.

5 September 2026

Changed

  • Reverb and delay sends are amplitudes: 100 is unity, 50 is 6 dB down, and 30 is a normal, clearly audible send.

Fixed

  • SOLO blinks while anything is still soloed, and HOME clears a latched SOLO like every other latch.
  • The first encoder turn after HOME counts instead of being swallowed.
  • MOD’s depth multiplier is drawn on the label when it is not 1.

4 September 2026

Changed

  • All seventy-one presets rebuilt. Every one has its own mix instead of eight identical faders, makes chords, grooves and swings, and the twenty drone and ambient presets became twenty distinct rooms rather than one arrangement shared between them.
  • Nineteen different effect pairs across the pack, chosen for character.
  • A drone’s bottom two layers no longer evolve, so its foundation cannot drop out.

Fixed

  • SHIFT + PAD MODE no longer hands the pads to a sequencer of the daemon’s own.
  • The daemon shrugs off MIDI and HID errors that used to end the process.
  • A driver rollback is one command, and it has been tried.

3 September 2026

Changed

  • Holding a button redraws only the line that changed. Holding DUPLICATE and pressing a Group fell from 308 messages to 154.

2 September 2026

Added

  • Chords on the voices, and CHANCE below 100 breaks a chord into pieces differently every bar.
  • The pads edit a recorded take: tap an empty step and a note appears at the nearest pitch your take uses.

Fixed

  • EXIT works. It had been in the instrument since 1 September doing nothing — it read the channel’s level from the wrong place, and a part now closes through its filter as intended.
  • A pad tap in STEP mode no longer deletes a recorded pattern.
  • Knobs that cannot change a take say so rather than moving a number: LEAN, LANE, RHYTHM on a drum, RANGE and VELO on a voice.
  • A locked channel blinks its Group button from every page.
  • Erasing a step removes the whole chord, not one note of it.
  • A long note no longer deletes the note after it.
  • The page ring stopped repainting both screens for pages nobody read — ten pages cost 192 messages instead of 456.

1 September 2026 — the surface, redesigned

Changed

  • Four modes instead of five — CONTROL, STEP, AUTO, VOLUME: how it sounds, what it plays, what the machine does by itself, what holds for everything. Read
  • The lens — hold ALL and the eight encoders become one verb across all eight channels. It replaced every per-verb spread page.
  • One duration rule for every modifier: a tap latches, a hold is momentary. Every modifier lights the same five ways.
  • HOME on the big encoder’s press: back to STEP page 1, latches dropped, nothing armed lost.
  • F1–F8 are mutes in every mode, and one button — PATTERN — regenerates either kind.

Added

  • RULE, a cellular automaton as a second way a register evolves. LEAN, a third placement generator. LANE, how far the generators may stray. MOVE, how often the machine may touch a channel at all. Read
  • PHRASE and FILL — the fourth bar answers the first. EXIT — a part leaves through its filter over a bar or four.
  • The bank grid: hold DUPLICATE and sixteen pads are sixteen whole arrangements.
  • A modulator’s wave is drawn on its column, and the panel says when generation has stopped.
  • Per-screen brightness and contrast, and half the display traffic — the two screens became independent.

Fixed

  • A drum pad tap adds a hit as well as removing one, so both kinds mean the same gesture.
  • Five controls that drew live on channels with no such control now draw dead, and NOTE REPEAT, PATTERN and REC light only when they can act.

31 August 2026

Added

  • The voices’ GEN page: ROTATE a melody, MODEL between shift register and bounded walk, and FEED so one voice takes another’s register.
  • A drum rhythm register — steps appear and disappear without the line sliding — and a pad tap flips a bit in it on both kinds, so a hand-chosen step survives ROTATE.
  • The chord walker, the MOD + RESTART pump, gate collapse on ARM, pad pressure into the voices, and MIDI export of a snapshot’s eight patterns.

30 August 2026

Fixed

  • The surface repaints itself after a replug; before this everything but the pads came back dark.
  • The pads stopped sticking, and a slow press sounds.

22 August 2026

  • A new factory snapshot, with the previous one kept beside it as the way back.
  • A dropped pad light no longer stays wrong forever.

21 August 2026

  • The factory snapshot ships at 125 BPM, which the sequencer can keep exactly.
  • The phrase clock corrects itself against the sequencer — drift fell from 3,896 parts per million to seven.
  • A drone and ambient snapshot pack.
  • A held countdown says HELD, and a DROP with nobody nominated refuses out loud instead of muting all eight.

20 August 2026 — the performance package

  • The phrase clock and ARM: one bar count for the whole instrument, and gestures that land on a boundary.
  • DROP, BREAK, HALF and DOUBLE, the CHANCE ramp and the ratchet ramp.
  • The mute grid on MUTE, beat repeat on the transport arrow, and the PENDING page.
  • A master insert — one filter across the whole mix.
  • The moving sweep marker was removed: redrawing it was taking the controller off the USB bus.

19 August 2026

  • Drift — the pattern itself moves at the wrap, and refuses on any channel you have taken over.
  • The big encoder became the page ring, so every mode can hold more than one page.
  • RATCHET, REROLL, the kit window, and a plugin’s switches on the F row.
  • Fixed: HITS and ROTATE were stored and displayed without ever reaching the pattern.

18 August 2026

  • The genre pack: fifty ready-made arrangements.
  • A failing wrap is isolated to its own channel, so one bad channel cannot take the instrument silent.

16 August 2026

  • The voice generator split into MELODY and RHYTHM, so a line’s notes and its rests evolve separately.
  • Played steps on a voice draw amber.
  • Encoder sensitivity halved, with TEMPO held restoring the old speed.

15 August 2026

  • Navigation buttons stay lit, the mode buttons go home, and REC lights only where recording is possible.

14 August 2026

  • Modulation: hold MOD and an encoder sets how a value moves rather than what it is — rates, shapes, depth, and MOD + ERASE to clear. Read

13 August 2026 — the instrument becomes its own project

  • The driver, the daemon, the installer and the guide moved into one self-contained repository, with the eight-channel instrument already playing.

See also