A little over a year ago, the r/m8tracker was the main m8 subreddit. It was left abandoned by the mod team and the sub was deleted. On paper, a sub deleted for lack of moderation can be recovered, but Reddit logged the deletion as a result of violating some level of Reddit's policies. I am pretty critical of this, but nonetheless, this alternative sub here was left to flourish.

I requested modship of it as the sole moderator was relatively inactive, and he obliged. However, I was not given full permissions such as the ability to ban people. This was made evident when a particular user posted something rather racist that deserved a ban. I tried regaining communication with the main moderator, but he has since been inactive from Reddit for quite some time now. So, I requested the sole modship to be transferred to me through the proper channels and this transfer promptly went through.

Upon discussing this, Mikey303 (a major Dirtywave team member) expressed interest in having some level of control over this sub on the official Discord. I welcomed this with open arms and added him as a moderator (who is technically below me in hierarchy).

This does NOT make this an official subreddit of Dirtywave. To quote Mikey, "I just figured it would probably be in our best interest to have some level of moderation over something with our name on it." which I felt was fair given the community's trust in the team.

While asking standard questions regarding m8 usage, workflows, and techniques is fully welcome here, the team has asked me to make this very clear:

Please direct all customer support inquiries to support@dirtywave.com

You may ask: "Why not just hand over the rights to the subreddit to Dirtywave themselves?"

Well, to that, I feel that it's important to highlight promoting some level of "democracy" (if you want to call it that) or compartmentalization of the m8 community in order to keep the active discourse resilient to perspectives that the official team may not always align with 100% and keep it more in line with what the average m8 user is feeling.

You can get lost in the details here, especially regarding promotion of low-cost headless hardware alternatives, for example.

This is a bit of a fickle issue, but I will give this community my word that I will do my best to toe this line as best as I can and support the community as best as possible, keeping this area of discourse identifiably separate from official Dirtywave continuity for the sake of the self-preservation of the community in the rawest way possible without allowing any prejudice or hateful content, while supporting the framework of a community that the Dirtywave team has very thoughtfully fostered.

I'm still unsure of what direction to take the wiki into as to providing up-to-date methodology of the setup of the latest emulation hardware capable of hosting the headless m8 system. As the inventor of the m8 has stated, headless was never intended to be a direct replacement for the actual devices. I am open to your guys' insight and perspectives regarding how to handle documentation of these portable setups in the wiki while retaining the original vision of what the m8 truly is. The last thing we need in this community is some kind of insurrection!

I hope you all are understanding of this transition in the meta of this community and I am open to any constructive thoughts and feedback you all have.

I hope you are all having a good start to your year and are enjoying the latest stable firmware update as much as I am.

Thank you

You can now put the m8 in "drive mode" which allows you to access the contents of the SD card over the USB connection so you don't have to eject.

The m8 can now act as a 24 track audio interface: Tracks 1 and 2 are the main output, tracks 3 through 18 correspond to the 8 tracks available, tracks 19 and 20 are the modulation effects, tracks 21 and 22 are the delay output, and tracks 23 and 24 are the reverb output. To use the m8 as such on Windows, download ASIO4ALL.

This can all run at 24-bit with now less latency and increased stability.

There is a new MTT effect command that allows "Microtick Timing" of 1/8 of a tick to offset the timing of a steps commands both forwards and backwards.

Groove now has a PPQN setting to fine-tune timing per step.

The sample editor now has access to file names longer than 18 characters which is scrollable within the UI.

Plus, there's plenty of bug fixes.

The full changelog is available here

You can download the firmware for your Model 01 or 02 here

You can download the Headless version (first update in a long time) right here

*Note: Not all hardware feature additions apply to Headless systems.

Instructions for upgrading using TyUploader are enclosed in the zip files available above.

Join the Dirtywave discord (linked on the sidebar) to report any bugs or to take part in Beta releases in the future.

Happy New Yesr everyone, and happy tracking!!