Hi Intellijel!
Sorry for bringing up an old topic, but after one year in modular this is my first encounter with this dilemma and I have some doubts on what path I want to take…
I just purchased the Steppy 1U, already having the Metropolix and Planar2. With the addition of Steppy, I started feeling like my wonderful anti-computer music machine now has a lot of file-saving that needs to be done.
Personally, I feel the case for a patch booting up like you left it and not having to autosave is very clear if you think about it like this:
Imagine having to go through every single module in your case to manually save the state of them every time you shut off.
Now compare that against everything just saving by itself. If you want to save / recall something specific or a clean slate, you still can, so to me the downside is of autosaving is not so evident either.
I read in this thread (Steppy autosave - #2 by slowwild) that this was mainly done to reduce wear on the EEPROM, but there is also a reply with a technical suggestion that makes me feel one might be able to balance these two concerns better. Even if the auto-save feature only saved every 30 minutes, we could at least just leave our systems alone for a while before powering off and not have to remember what modules I have to save states on. If you consider 30 modules with this feature or not the difference becomes quite stark.
Rainmaker, Tetrapad, Tete, Quadrax and Plonk are high on my next to buy list right now, but this is causing some doubts about whether the instrument will feel as immediate and playful if more and more modules require manual saving.
As far as I know Quadrax saves everything, but will Plonk, Tetrapad, Tete and Rainmaker be modules that I will have to go through and save if I want to continue where I left off later?
So I am humbly asking, Is there any chance you could give users the choice to enable a not so frequent auto-save feature? Or are there other technical limitations that make this unrealistic?
Alex