Designing the next Micro BR

[tackium]

The storage did not come to mind inmeadetely to me because I find it takes plenty of recordings to fill a 1Gb card. However, the first card I ever tried was a 2GB and was surprised only half was recognized. The BR is definetly behind in this area.
And better transfer speed would be welcome, especially when the technology was available when the Micro BR came out.

[64Guitars]

The storage did not come to mind inmeadetely to me because I find it takes plenty of recordings to fill a 1Gb card.

Oh, I agree completely. A 1GB card is more than adequate for my needs. In fact, if it had a USB OTG or Host port so you could connect a portable hard drive, a 256MB card would be big enough. You'd only need enough room for the song you're currently working on. Then you could quickly and easily copy it to the hard drive, erase the card, and start a new song.

The problem isn't that we need bigger cards. The problem is that the only cards that currently work with the Micro BR are getting hard to find and perhaps in a couple of years it might be nearly impossible to find one. So the next Micro BR has to be able to accept the popular memory cards that are (and will be) available in the stores.

[hooper]

There are some improvements that I think Boss could make that don't even involve making any costly hardware changes.  No use expecting Boss to add more features without upping the price and remember: Part of the appeal of the current Micro BR is it's cost niche.    Maybe anyone willing to pay more for more bells and whistles should just go ahead and move up to the next price level and get themselves a BR-600 (or beyond). I'll probably eventually do that some day. But for now:

* Quit calling the M-BR a '4-track machine with 32 virtual tracks'.  It's confusing and implies that there is a difference between a 'real' track and a 'virtual' track when there IS no difference. I think it's more clear to think of it as a 4-channel machine with 8 tracks available on each channel. Maybe just label the 4 big buttons A, B, C and D.  That way instead of thinking 'Track 2, Virtual track 3', you could just call it 'B3' and know exactly where you're at.  There are already too many ways to use the word 'track'.  Ex: 'Hey, I just recorded a killer guitar track on Track 1, virtual track 3 of my 4-track recorder. This song is gonna be the best track on my new CD.  That is ....if I can keep track of the tracks!'   

* Do some more research and re-think what demographic of consumers they are trying to sell the M-BR to and compare that to who is actually buying it.  Out of the box, the Boss Micro BR seems to have been customized to appeal to less than ~24 year old guitar players who are primarily interested in producing sounds with heavy distortion and extreme effects. Check out the bank of 80 preset guitar/bass patches and find that easily more than 60 of the presets fall into this category.  However the survey polling the age of users on this site suggests the majority of M-BR users are more mature:
- less than 20 years old  2%
- 20-30 years old  11%
- more than 30 years old 87%
Apparently the hardware has the capacity to hold 80 patches in the guitar/bass bank.  Seems like it should be cheap and easy enough to just replace a dozen or two of the heavy-distortion and balls-to-the-wall Guitar Hero patches with some more variety of quality sounds, including more slots reserved for bass patches.  No new hardware needed, just re-budget some of the memory space already available.

* Re: Rhythm Pattern presets.... Similar argument as regarding the Guitar/Bass patches. Ex: Only one pattern set with a side stick instead of a loud snare hit. A couple of 3/4, 6/8 patches would be nice.  Again, just re-budget the space available.

* Re: Presets for recording in stereo with an external mic. The MSTR TOOL KIT is the only algorithm that will process in stereo. However the BR's excellent Noise Suppressor is not available with the MTK.  I don't know if this is a hardware limitation or not but it sure would be nice to be able to use NS with a stereo mic.  This would upgrade the M-BR's worth as a high quality field recorder, for all kinds of applications.


Not complaining... I really like my Micro BR and am constantly amazed at the sounds that people around here are getting out of it.     
 






     

 

[Greeny]

There's a feature I noticed when I was looking at the spec for the Boss BR-600 that I really liked the sound of. It's not on the Micro, but I imagine it could be.

It was the ability to add radio static and vintage turntable crackle etc into songs / vocals. I'd quite like some ambience like that up for grabs.

And I totally agree with hooper that Boss should re-think / adjust the content of the guitar effects and rhythm patterns. Given that one heavily distorted metal guitar sound is pretty much like every other one (to my ears anyway!!!), it would make more sense to expand on the 'cleaner' tones available and have more classic player / amp simulations and combinations on board (e.g. I'd love a George Harrison simulation for his tones on 'Something' and 'While my Guitar Gently Weeps').

Bass players look like they could do with a bit more consideration in the effects department too.

But overall - and for the price - it's hard to fault this lovely little box of tricks.

[guitarron]

5. At least 4GB addressable memory.

Yes. I would have thought that the 1GB storage limit would have been everyone's #1 concern.

forgot that one-thats a good one

[stevet]

5. At least 4GB addressable memory.

Yes. I would have thought that the 1GB storage limit would have been everyone's #1 concern.

forgot that one-thats a good one

Well, from reading some posts, it's not everyones. 1GB is surely reasonable.
But, since I have large studio recording equipment, I like the thought of having a small portable unit as a scratch pad for storing ideas. So the more memory, the better for me.  This way I do not have to worry about frequently off loading to my computer.

Last night I used it on a live mixer feed from our show. It stole over 600MB of memory (stereo track)..

[64Guitars]

No use expecting Boss to add more features without upping the price and remember: Part of the appeal of the current Micro BR is it's cost niche.

In this world of technology, new products usually offer more and better features than their predecessors for the same or less money. Technology always seems to get better and cheaper. So, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the next Micro BR to have more and/or better features than the current model for about the same price. Of course, it has to fit within the line of BR models available at the time of its release. We can't expect all of the features of a BR-1600 for the price of a Micro BR. Let's face it, the Micro BR is the bottom of the line, so the rest of the line must have more and/or better features to justify the higher price and entice people to buy them. If the entire BR line was replaced with new models at about the same time, they could improve the Micro BR significantly without changing its relationship to the other models in terms of price and features.

One hardware change they could probably make with little or no change in cost is to increase the size of the internal memory. The cost of memory is always dropping while capacities increase. Most of the BR's features are implemented through software rather than hardware (effects, drums, etc.), so more internal memory would allow them to improve the Micro BR via software without any significant hardware changes.

* Quit calling the M-BR a '4-track machine with 32 virtual tracks'.  It's confusing and implies that there is a difference between a 'real' track and a 'virtual' track when there IS no difference.

Yes, the term "track" is certainly over-used and can be very confusing to beginners. I believe Zoom uses the term v-Take rather than v-track. That's probably a bit less confusing. I like to think of the Micro BR as a 32-track recorder with a built-in 4-channel stereo mixer. The 32 tracks are arranged in four groups of eight with the four groups connected to the four input channels of the mixer. You can select any one of the eight tracks in each group to be the input to the corresponding channel of the mixer.

Apparently the hardware has the capacity to hold 80 patches in the guitar/bass bank.  Seems like it should be cheap and easy enough to just replace a dozen or two of the heavy-distortion and balls-to-the-wall Guitar Hero patches with some more variety of quality sounds, including more slots reserved for bass patches.  No new hardware needed, just re-budget some of the memory space already available.

* Re: Rhythm Pattern presets.... Similar argument as regarding the Guitar/Bass patches. Ex: Only one pattern set with a side stick instead of a loud snare hit. A couple of 3/4, 6/8 patches would be nice.  Again, just re-budget the space available.

True, but if they increased the internal memory as I mentioned above, they could add lots of usable new effects without removing any of the existing ones. Likewise for rhythm patterns.

* Re: Presets for recording in stereo with an external mic. The MSTR TOOL KIT is the only algorithm that will process in stereo. However the BR's excellent Noise Suppressor is not available with the MTK.  I don't know if this is a hardware limitation or not but it sure would be nice to be able to use NS with a stereo mic.  This would upgrade the M-BR's worth as a high quality field recorder, for all kinds of applications.

Very good point!

[Indiana]

...
Last night I used it on a live mixer feed from our show. It stole over 600MB of memory (stereo track)...

How long was recording and which format did you
record in.  ie MBR native mode,  wav, mp3 ?

Just curious. If it was wav, for example, you'd probably have
recorded about 50 minutes of material.

[stevet]

It was in native high rez MT2 mode . After looking closer it was 2HRs and 427.6MB

Not complaining here...
It it had more memory, I could leave the show on it and record the remaining three shows without off-loading.

Having said that, I only bought this to practice with. 
Having the ability and memory to use as a field recorder is a PLUS. I was not expecting this.  Very nice.
It blows the Tascam MP-GT1 away. If you think the MBR reverb sounds bad, just wait until you hear the GT1.  In one word "crap".

[64Guitars]

It was in native high rez MT2 mode . After looking closer it was 2HRs and 427.6MB

For live recordings, try LV1 or LV2 (the "LV" stands for "live"). They will give very good results (especially LV1) and not use as much memory card space.