With the release of Hapax, is Pyramid still supported/updated?

Meaning from now on, no PyraOS update ever to look for ?
Not complaining really, there has been several OS updates for Pyramid already, but seems to me, 4.02 has still some rough edges left from the 4.00/4.01 versions “debacle”.

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abandon-ware? I think you could phrase it a bit “nicer” in the title!

If you have issues, you should report them to Squarp via the contact form, Im sure they will fix bugs.

i sure hope not. I honestly would love to get my hands on a mk4 if they ever do it. Like a pyramid with a nice screen and a little beefier processor to iron out some of the clocking issues :drooling_face:

anyways - what technobear said about bugs too - if you can help them reproduce the issue you see on your side, they’ll usually fix it. I run into bugs plenty, so i feel you and hope they continue to make pyraos updates. That said, I have no reason to believe they won’t - I see pyramid as a different use case than hapax (and hapax is way cool, but i’ll be sticking with my pyramid). Anyways, i’ll cross my fingers and hope they got a mk4 around the corner :slight_smile:

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Given the massive differences between the products in price and features, I’d doubt that they would leave that sector abandoned. Perhaps a new product or revision? Who knows?

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lol, company releases new product … users start speculating about the next product :wink:

Pyramid is still being sold, and, unless told otherwise, Id assume supported.

for sure, its now considered mature/stable, but Squarp have been saying that about the Pyramid for a long time now… that major new features were unlikely (due to cpu/ram limits) , but we are still getting bug fixes.
that’s not news, and hasn’t changed with Hapax release.

the thing is hardware, is not like (computer) software, it doesn’t evolve forever… at some point its basically ‘complete’… and that is OK, since if its working, it carries on working.
(unlike computers where a new version of Windows/MacOS might break your software)
I’d certainly not view hardware as ‘abandoned’ just because it was considered ‘complete’.
(lots of hardware gets hardly any updates.)

I do agree that Hapax is a different product, and perhaps market.
… but we have no idea, what that means about future plans.
would it be a pyramid 4, or a mini hapax, or something else?
given history pyramid → hermod → hapax, more likely to be an evolution…

who knows… no one here, perhaps squarp , perhaps not :slight_smile:

edit: actually Im going to re-title this thread to be a little less ‘confrontational’

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Just going to toss in to what @thetechnobear stated… My Kurzweil K2661 and Access Virus Indigo haven’t had updates in nearly 20yrs and they’re doing just fine.

I would be sorta sad to see the Pyramid sunsetted as I just bought in a couple months ago… I can’t work as frequently as I’d like but I have most of the basic features down and it’s my dream sequencer… I’m putting together songs just like I wanted to do with my MC-505 back in the day, only I’m sequencing all this other gear.

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100% agreed with @thetechnobear and @industrialist .

No one should ever buy any product (of any sort from any company) unless they’re happy with what it is at the time of purchase at the price asked.

I think expecting game-breaking flaws to be repaired (or a reasonable expectation of ability to return a like-new product within a reasonable timeframe) is very reasonable, but expecting continued development and evolution is, IMHO, very unreasonable.

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This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

in March, with the release of Hapax, I had apparently the bad taste of evoking in this forum Pyramid as “abandon ware”. Which term was promptly “censured” by Techno bear, and replaced with more … suave terms.

In those days and in response to my inquiry, he said:

" Pyramid is still being sold, and, unless told otherwise, Id assume supported.
for sure, its now considered mature/stable, but Squarp have been saying that about the Pyramid for a long time now… that major new features were unlikely (due to cpu/ram limits) , but we are still getting bug fixes. that’s not news, and hasn’t changed with Hapax release.".

Well, 3 months latter, is there news of any work being done on PyraOS ?
Are we (we, the masses still working with Pyramid, and not wondrous Hapax) getting bug fixes for PyraOS ?

Just asking … :slightly_smiling_face:

I cannot speak for Squarp themselves, but I’m guessing there are no more updates in terms of features, but you can still submit bug reports to them, so hopefully they’ll fix those. I’m not sure if there are any bugs outstanding, though? Dunno.

With regards to being ‘abandonware’ I would say, in my opinion, that it’s not really fair on Squarp to say that. They did several years of updates, and then they released a new project. I understand that it’s probably a bit annoying to see them concentrate on the new shiny thing and not the thing that you have, but that’s kind of how it works. I wouldn’t use the term ‘abandonware’ as to me it implies something is unfinished, where I honestly don’t think the Pyramid is unfinished.

This is, of course, my opinion, but I do think they’ve supported Pyramid pretty damned well, and it still feels like a mature project.

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I stand by that statement…still seems 100% accurate to me.

I’d also say, its pretty obvious, that with a small development team with a new product (Hapax).
Squarp are going to focus on that for many months, frankly, no Id not expect to see much dev on any other platform for a while yet … (3-6 months is a short timeframe!)

that doesn’t mean it wont happen - I have no insight into this… they may be working on other firmwares for Pyramid/Hermod/Rample… its just my opinion, it be understandable to focus on Hapax for many months to come.

as for ‘censure’ of abandonware … Im with @Loz
I frankly felt, if you feel this, then you have unrealistic expectations of a mature product, at its stage of its product lifecycle, and given statements already made of years by Squarp.

of course, I sympathise if you have a particular bug/issue thats causing you an issue, then you’d want resolution asap… (rather than a feature request)
as stated in the post (you didn’t fully quote), really the best way forward is for you to talk to Squarp via the contact form - see if its in their pipeline for resolving and its priority.

I think working with Squarp, rather than trying to imply lack of support here will likely get you better results.

of course, you are welcome to disagree…

point of note: I didn’t censure you… I did not close the topic,
sure, I re-titled the thread as I thought it was ‘confrontational’, but frankly others on the topic thought that abandonware was not appropriate… no-one agreed with you that abandonware was applicable :wink:
(topics are automatically closed, when there is no further activity… which is what happened in this case)

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EDIT: Ive merge this with the original topic… given its basically the same question.

but to summarise:

we don’t have any news on future pyramid development, or any change in status of ‘support’.
if you want more information please contact Squarp via the contact form.

similarly, if you have a bug/issue with the Pyramid, as always please contact Squarp Support via the same contact form…

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the bugs I reported before the release 4.01 are still not fixed in 4.02 :sob:

Quite clearly, and despite the declarations of the forum intendant, Pyramid seems placed on "has been " status by Squarp.
Last OS update (and for that matter anything Pyramid) was almost a year and half.
We are told Pyramid is quite “mature”, fully developed, reached RAM/CPU limits, etc… yet for the “old” Akai MPC1000, JJ has been releasing JJOS updates, and bug fixes for literally decades !!

And Pyramid bugs remain. Like others I sent my reports long ago, still it seems that Squarp has chosen to totally focus on Hapax, and place Pyramid in the nether zone.

One thing is sure, I won’t be getting an Hapax anytime soon.
:eject_button:

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What bugs did you report? What workarounds are there, if any?

when was the Akai firmware update? looks like 2.13, which was 2010… so over 12 years ago.
official support is long gone ( jjos is by a third party…reverse engineered, iirc)
so, you’re comparing apples n’ oranges… there are open source projects that support much older products than this :wink:

back to Squarp - Hermod, Rample and Hapax all got updates in July… Pyramid was the ‘missing one’.
no idea, if this was just because of time/resources, or just wasn’t anything to be released… e.g. bugs requiring fixes.
if a bug is still present, Id suggest talking to Squarp…
find out, are planning a fix or not, and also check that they have understood and been able to reproduce the issue - this can be tricky, if the bug is in an esoteric corner/use-case.

anyway… as I said previously… best course of action is to work with developers, and get some direct information ‘from the horses mouth’

For example: note lengths are reported incorrectly when track signature R is different from default TS R. I’m not aware of any workaround for this (except perhaps not using different signatures).
There are also many other bugs regarding note lengths, for example under some circumstances the length of an existing note can’t be increased beyond a certain limit, one workaround could be deleting the note and entering a new one with the desired length.
I also reported a bug that resets the CC LFO waveform with certain combinations of time signature and LFO speed. A workaround might be not using those combinations of TS and LFO speed.
There is also a very basic sequencing function still missing described here: Pyramid make a sequence be half speed or double speed? I don’t know any workaround apart from reworking the whole track manually or editing the midi file on the SD card in a computer

Thanks for replying. Yeah, things that are clearly bugs — deviations from how a feature is documented to behave — should be fixed and I hope they will!

Of course it is fair to say that one should only buy a product if one is happy with how it is at that point, but I think it is also fair to expect a correctly working product based on how it is presented in the marketing and documentation. I am completely on-board with the development of new features being halted at some point, but known bugs should be fixed, IMHO.

From my correspondence with Squarp regarding some bugs, I gather they are committed to fixing them at some point in the future, but also not working on it until further notice. As I understand it, this is due to focusing development efforts on the newly-released Hapax, but also because the Pyramid’s future is rather uncertain due to a component shortage. Frankly I have a lot of understanding for that and I fully believe Squarp are trying to make the best out of a not-ideal situation.

(I believe the above paragraph is an accurate representation of what Squarp have told me. Of course I may have inadvertently misrepresented something, in which case I apologize. I could paste the actual e-mails from Squarp here but I don’t think it’s fair to put their communication to me individually out in the open like that.)

In my opinion open-sourcing the Pyramid code would be a great solution, saving Squarp some precious development resources while enabling the users to fix their devices. Alas, it is probably a difficult decision for them to release their IP like that.

while I’m certainly an advocate of open-sourcing stuff, seeing it as a “solution” is a very optimistic point of view…

that said, only the SEQ mode on pyramid could use a lot of improvements, the other modes are pretty good the way they are. I hope Squarp will continue with the Pyramid in some form… I checked hapax and - while its a nice product - I prefer the pyramid workflow