KRONOS Relaunched!

[blazerunner]

In fairness, neither have Yamaha or Roland. I'm honestly not sure what revolutionary new thing awaits.

Well just strictly speaking in terms of Korg based on we're we are but Roland and Yamaha have innovated their own series in their own way that has kept their customers satisfied. Korg seems to have all of us on "Do not read" for some reason.It just feels like the innovative ideas they used to have when it came to workstations has come to pass. I assume a majority of us on here are above average musicians. We can make anything sound good because we know how to play an instrument. Even with the Kronos being so out of date folks like us will find a way to push it further. It would just be nice if Korg gave us an assists to make our jobs easier. They don't even need to make a new Kronos just update the existing one with some features to help us operate it smoother. Reading that sticky about features we'd like to see a lot of them aren't unreasonable and can be added to the present keyboard.

I just imagine a Kronos 3 is what we would have anticipated being an updated/upgraded Kronos that solved some of the problems a lot of us ran into with the previous versions. Most of our complaints were just about the Kronos Workflow. I dream of better streamlining on the Kronos. Every save I do I quadruple check to make sure its done right. The sampler and it's methodology and the auto load is a pita. Saving custom sounds you make is also a gamble that makes you cross your fingers hoping you did it right everytime. There's just too many steps to make a simple mistake and it all go wrong.Even if you do it 1,000 times the one time you're tired after a playing for 5-6 hours you're going to botch something before you get ready for bed.

I'm always going to be a workstation guy though. Turning on a computer and using a midi controller isn't the same feeling as an actual instrument right in front of you.The other guys do make nice keyboards as well just like you said. I enjoyed those too but my brand loyalty always has me seeking Korg's offerings first. I feel that's the same for the other guys too. Roland guys stay with the Rolands, Yamaha guys stay with the Yamaha's and Korg guys stay with the Korgs. Many of us just update to the newer workstations as we go through life. Now it's time for us to molt from the Kronos shell we're in to something new and Korg hasn't offered us anything.

[ITguy54]

In fairness, neither have Yamaha or Roland. I'm honestly not sure what revolutionary new thing awaits. They're all damn fine keyboards.

I

However, all of these things are really more computer stuff. If I was in charge of R&D at any of the big three, I'd be at a loss in terms of what the next new workstation revolution would be.

In the meantime, the Kronos is still an excellent piece of kit.

I have some ideas. Several years ago there was a Canadian company that made this amazing digital synthesizer called the Technos Acxel. I heard it in person and I’ve never heard anything like it since. Also, several years ago Gibson guitars owned the Oberheim name. There was a genius who worked there. I think his name was Lynx Crowe. He came up with a synthesis technology called F.A.R. synthesis. It stood for Fourier Analysis and Resynthesis. The SOB running Gibson at the time killed the project and harassed Crowe in the legal system. That’s why I’ve hated Gibson ever since. If a new Kronos replacement could have easy integration with VSTs, like the Open Labs Neko, it would be truly an open ended system.

[ChrisDuncan]

I just imagine a Kronos 3 is what we would have anticipated being an updated/upgraded Kronos that solved some of the problems a lot of us ran into with the previous versions. Most of our complaints were just about the Kronos Workflow.

I think a big part of the problem is that to a certain degree, the Kronos is actually the Triton on steroids. I could be wrong, but I believe that our OS is basically the Triton OS modified for the Oasys and then modified for the Kronos. We're tied to an OS architecture that was released in 1999.

I know there are a lot of software devs here, so I'm sure you can understand what it's like to have to maintain a 25 year old codebase. Everything in the UI is dependent on the architecture of the OS, and I would imagine that a lot of things we'd like to see would be a pain in the posterior based on how things currently work. This is the curse of software devs everywhere.

To really revolutionize the functionality, they'd need to do a major rewrite of the OS to see the world in a new way. That's never gonna happen. What it will take is something new like the Triton, where they write the new software from scratch (and for all I know, the Triton may be a modification of its ancestors as well). So, for any major workflow changes, that's going to be an extreme limitation.

That said, I would imagine there are lots of smaller things in the feature requests that wouldn't be require a massive overhaul to implement. It would just require Korg to listen to its customers. The odds of that happening are also not encouraging.

[BlackForest]

Well, I am not a programmer but seeing the new small Korg releases I could imagine that for the next workstation we would see something along those lines?
Hopefully with a larger display than the wavestate's
And also I could imagine a similar approach like Roland with their cloud based instruments.
And until this is all ready to be released, Korg revived the Kronos for the time being.

[GerardH69]

I am a developer and I work on software which is at least 30 years old. I have been involved in porting this software from different hardware and from 32bits to 64bits. This software is used daily in critical systems.

So if Korg wants to do it is possible and even more simple than my project
It runs on Linux and although that OS is also evolved it should be far easier to do. To convert from 32bits to 64bits is much harder and you have to know what you’re doing.

The problem is that it takes time and you have to pay for the development. It is much easier to keep the current software and charge the current fee. I do not know what they did for the nautilus but if that is based on a newer baseline OS it should be a good starting point.

I think that they do not want to touch the software. Why is there no new installer which can handle larger ssd drives? That should be easy!

[ChrisDuncan]

The problem is that it takes time and you have to pay for the development. It is much easier to keep the current software and charge the current fee.

I think you hit the nail on the head. They've been porting the software to different hardware (Triton => Oasys => Kronos => Nautilus), although obviously not from 32 to 64 bit. As you doubtless know, that's no small thing as it is, but it's much smaller in scope than writing a brand new OS from the ground up. Which is, of course, what we developers would much rather be doing if we had our way.

In addition to having to pay for development, there's also the financial risk. As we know, dev ain't cheap, so you know there are managers saying, "What if we spend all this money to write a new system and nobody buys it?" And that's a fair question. If it was my company and my money, I'd worry about that, too.

All in all it's safer to just polish up an already great product, put it in a new package, and let the salespeople do their thing.

[Pedja]

If only it was in a new package, they just put dark wood on the sides.

[janrhansen]

Why does it have the same polyphony? Aren't the processors faster now? The good news is when ours breaks, we can buy another.

Because it is using the exact same setup as the Original Kronos. This was also the case when the Kronos 2 was released. It featured a slightly upgraded Intel Atom chip that was a tad faster than the 2011 model, but the system is based on the exact same numbers for voice stealing so the K2 didn't benefit anything from that the processor was maybe 10% more powerful.

There were back in the early Kronos days some people that experienced with changing the mobo and cpu with a more modern i5 processor and then "hacked" the Korg setup files and managed to get considerably more polyphony out of it, with a few quirks of some of the big combi's acting up and crashing the system. But generally it did work.

I suspect that Korg don't really have the full source of the original Oasys system which is why they haven't ever tried to seriously update the system software to take full advantage of newer hardware as you could easy find a fairly cheap mobile based mobo and cpu today that is more than 10x as powerful as those 2 different Atom based mobo's used in the Kronos, Kronos X and Kronos 2. They have most likely just optimized the underlying Linux system with the K3 to get the boot time advancement. All the "synth" software is just the same as the old Kronos with some new sample libraries added.

I still believe that they may have some engineers working on reverse engineering the Kronos software to create a better software base in line with their current Software collection and "Native" versions of all their newer Pi based Synths for creating a new top board. I believe he K3 is just a placeholder to calm down the Kronos community for some years until they have a finished product. Pretty sure the Nautilus was supposed to be that place holder but most likely their schedule did not hold and the Nautilus kinda flopped big time.

[janrhansen]

I just imagine a Kronos 3 is what we would have anticipated being an updated/upgraded Kronos that solved some of the problems a lot of us ran into with the previous versions. Most of our complaints were just about the Kronos Workflow. I dream of better streamlining on the Kronos. Every save I do I quadruple check to make sure its done right. The sampler and it's methodology and the auto load is a pita. Saving custom sounds you make is also a gamble that makes you cross your fingers hoping you did it right everytime. There's just too many steps to make a simple mistake and it all go wrong.Even if you do it 1,000 times the one time you're tired after a playing for 5-6 hours you're going to botch something before you get ready for bed.

You are absolutely right. There really isn't that much more we could ask for that we don't already have in the Kronos for a gigging musician.

I don't see it as a "Studio" workstation as todays software is so much more advanced nowadays compared to back in the late 90's where the first iterations of the Oasys system was mind blowing ahead of its time.

It is mostly some of the archaic workflow like the horrible Sampler, and especially the quirky file system and how you save and autoload stuff.
It is an extremely powerful machine if you can get your head around how all the different things work.

I could see a new system that more combines the way different kind of artists work. The Kronos is primarily catered to the classic gigging musician. Not to the more modern young artists.
I could see a line of both Classic keyboards and some MPC models that can load specific VST plugins that is registered by Korg and optimized for their hardware a bit like Akai have announced collaborating with NI. Korg already have most of the existing engines in the Kronos in their software collection + lots more. Only thing missing is a new modern sampler with software support for PC/Mac maybe using already existing software like Sample Robot
and give us an engine like the the (R.I.P) Prophet X with real analog filters or like the Triton a real valve output. Just an idea .. the Prophet X was actually a great idea just poorly implemented and plagued with software bugs and a poor set of factory sounds. Just imagine having the old and maybe tons of new custom made wavetables and samples for a re-imagined DW-8000 engine with real analog filters, god I loved that thing. Always regretted selling mine after getting the M-1 and later T3. Only thing I miss in the Korg Collection.

[blazerunner]

Interesting conversations here. I'm just wondering if there's anything on these re-issues that I can use to upgrade or modify my current OG Kronos 2.

[GerardH69]

Why does it have the same polyphony? Aren't the processors faster now? The good news is when ours breaks, we can buy another.

Because it is using the exact same setup as the Original Kronos. This was also the case when the Kronos 2 was released. It featured a slightly upgraded Intel Atom chip that was a tad faster than the 2011 model, but the system is based on the exact same numbers for voice stealing so the K2 didn't benefit anything from that the processor was maybe 10% more powerful.
[…]
They have most likely just optimized the underlying Linux system with the K3 to get the boot time advancement. All the "synth" software is just the same as the old Kronos with some new sample libraries added.

There were some hackers that replaced their motherboard and got it running with 200 voices and a boot time of less than 20 seconds. This was in 2016!

Now 8 years later Korg presents the K3 with a boot time of 50 seconds and probably no change to the number of voices.

[thethirdapple]

"HACK" is sooo... I believe the current vernacular is: to distill

og blog posts: k r o n o s h a c k e r . b l o g s p o t . c o m

The blog illustrates that by removing or bypassing routines which ensure system integrity some "gain" is perceived. Yet hardly seem worth the effort considering.

Please do not break someone else's work, adding and modding is perhaps all together different.

And so while I won't be removing any checkSUM's from any of my compu... I mean synths anytime soon, I do look forward to ending the infernal screen replacement conundrum in one day by-passing all of these old screens!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2t11zNhNlc

I wish someone would just make a synth output port for vga/hdmi... this (vga) is something the Roland S-50 sampling board has and its fantastic, although resolution is scary low by todays standards... Sure, some including KORG have given us "visual software controllers" via usb to some degree of satisfaction but?!?!






PEACE
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[ChrisDuncan]

Interesting conversations here. I'm just wondering if there's anything on these re-issues that I can use to upgrade or modify my current OG Kronos 2.

If you mean the fleet of small synths that they've been releasing lately, I think maybe that's the next frontier.

For a gigging musician, it makes sense to have a single monster keyboard like the Kronos. However, if you're a studio rat, I could easily see going down the rabbit hole buying all these neat new synths and just adding them to your midi setup. Although I'm sure in a great many cases you could probably get the same sounds out of one of the K engines.

Fortunately for me (or my credit card, as it were) I already have too many toys that I haven't adequately explored, so I've managed to avoid gas in this particular scenario.

[bpoodoo]

There's a thread on here several phone books thick of features people liked to see added or fixed on the Kronos and Korg pretty much ignores all of it if they even bothered.

Korg will never know the opportunities for additional sales had they updated the OS to address some of the user requests as summarized in http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpBB3/ ... p?t=122482

One that irks me relates to RPPR and goes back 25 years to the Triton days. It renders unusable the lower 15 keys of an 88 key model when RPPR is turned on. From Operations Guide of Triton and Kronos:
"C2 and lower keys are used to stop playback, and cannot be assigned."

Also please extend the range of available RPPR keys on the 76 and 88 key models so that the lower keys are not wasted by having them devoted to the all patterns off function. Only one key need be dedicated to this function.

It's a snub to longtime Korg workstation users to not address such reasonable requests. By sticking to the same long-time workstation OS code base, Korg should be expected to incorporate requested enhancements, especially the "easy" ones, in Kronos OS updates. Perhaps the code is no longer maintainable? Or there is no staff with the expertise to do so?

[ChrisDuncan]

Perhaps the code is no longer maintainable?

No codebase that old is ever maintainable.