Polyend Play - First Thoughts

After a week of use, I wanted to share my thoughts on the new Polyend Play groovebox. This is not a full review, just the things that stood out to me initially. Full review and more thoughts will be coming in a few weeks when I've had more time with it.

And yes, a few times I accidentally referred to the vertical keyboard as horizontal. Oops :)

[andycordy]

Thank you. It's amazing how far you've got in only a short time. Really helpful. I guess you're holding off on the full review.

[_adrienmccarthy]

I’ve definitely had the same issues with the live record stuff. I just pick a sample, place it on one square and then go into live mode and record from there and I’ll just erase that first instance I put down later. Not a great workaround but I find it to be more consistent. Also mot a fan of the vertical keyboard, your suggestion of laying it across the top is great. Overall a fun device, very enjoyable but def room to grow.

[craigtracy]

I like it! Yes, it’s buggy. But wow, what a great little box to have in the world! Congratulations Polyend. Hope you guys finish and finesse the Play to its fullest. Looks fantastic!

[rworksee]

Has there been any mentions of adding timestretch? Kinda crazy how rare that is for samplers these days

[TheFlippertube]

It's great to hear your feedback. I have the Tracker and found that it was spec'd with a tight tolerance such that MIDI would choke. I imagine this tight spec kept the price down, but it's undeniably something that needs to be front of mind when considering the options. It sounds like you're finding similar issues here.

[MarkKunoff]

New “bug fix only” firmware 1.0.1 was released on Aug 19 2022. So far so good!

[simonc]

Trying to work this... Mc707 share a lot of features....with a few more... The main selling point is the immediacy of the pattern generation... But not sure that balances out the cost...anyone convince me otherwise? Great review. Love how you break thinks down.

[sodiumlights]

Yes! ive been hoping you would make a video telling us your thoughts on the Play. Look forward to watching this tomorrow. I've always valued your clear-sighted opinions on gear, and I imagine it will be no different this time (as I've been considering buying it). Cheers.

[thehowlingterror]

It's not battery powered but fine from a battery pack. Can sequence 8 tracks of external MIDI gear with handy CC mapping per channel.

[machineagevoodoo]

Great overview. And yes it totally deselects the track when in live record mode so that you can't record. Also what I really miss is the ability to just play a sample on any button when scrolling through the list of samples. It could easily be done that the sample is played back by either pressing the sample knob itself or the screen buttons. Now you need to commit to entering in a step in the actual sequencer...

[ildafons]

Even Elektron Model Samples has class compliant USB so you can record audio to your DAW with USB cable and it is twice cheaper than Play and files transfer/backup functions are more comfortable with USB port. Using just memory card seems pretty old school.

[MarkKunoff]

I got Play a few days ago. Live Rec on midi tracks is wonky AF. After a cycle of recording, any notes you play are transposing what you recorded on the first cycle. I have overdub recording set to ON. --- I also have a damaged project folder which has missing samples in the sample pool after power down and back up. The pool is using about 50 percent of the space, but refuses to load up any new samples I added to the pool before power down/up. This bug is particularly frustrating since you can no longer expand on the sound palette of that project.

[rfwhyte]

I couldn't deal with the touch sensitive knobs. Just way too many unintentional inputs. A lot easier to get along with the Play with the touch sensitivity turned off for me.

[VJFranzK]

Thanks for good discussion! Suppose you like volume faders per track, SP1200, TR8s etc. is there an easy way to do that here? Would I be happy with this do you think? (Probably there is a way to get hardware faders via MIDI i'd expect...)

[hypebeastdad]

Nice review! Interesting name! My is Tarikh

[chuckvicious]

In midi mode, it has 'Jack Channel' and 'usb channel ' selection . Isn't that per track? So can't you control 8 different instruments at once, separately? Like I thought that's the whole point of this thing, but you're saying it cant?

[vinmar_music]

I picked this up the other day and I’m pretty disappointed so far. I’m comparing to Syntakt and Deluge, which are slightly more expensive but I feel the value is far better with those choices. I typically use either standalone, or control multiple synths / devices with deluge. At first I thought maybe it was just the sounds that weren’t hitting it for me, so I added some sample packs of my own. A little improvement - but not enough. Live play is pretty bad as you point out. Midi I was super excited to see if there was some kind of performance associated, but no. So outside of some interesting organic stuff, I’m not feeling it. I’ve spent a lot of time with it and the immediate gratification I received from Deluge, Syntakt, Cycles, and most of the other devices I have is far greater. I’m trying to find it’s sweet spot but mostly it has a few things I wish were on the Deluge… screen… variations… performance.

[mojodrum]

I have been creating my own sound packs and it’s been a lot of work. The challenge l have is to not exceed the 255 samples and the size of the packs which l have found to be a max of 80 mb.

[olivierf.]

So basically it's an 800 euros randomizer! Cool.

[ryanvincentjaeger]

Too bad you can't access the SD card via USB. I'm assuming there is no multi-channel audio output over USB as well?