The ucreate music is from mattel as part of their ucreate series (currently two ‘toys’) that are designed to stretch childrens minds in a modern, artistic and affordable way.

It immediately caught my attention, it’s like a kaos pad for 6 year olds and only costs $30. My immediate thought was “this is the speak and spell of the 21st century, this could be huge”. So I brought one – after getting it this evening, I will probably be buying one for every child I know who for Christmas this year, as it’s one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in a long time.

I posted my immediate thoughts on the Monome forums, I’ll just borrow that for here:

http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=6224&page=1#Item_23

You basically have 4 banks (the rows) they can contain any of the samples in the “manager” each row starting one stops the current one, all 4 rows can run at once.

Each row can be selected and that’s when the FX comes into play, you cab choose from something like 7 or 8 FX using a dial and when you press and wiggle the big button the FX is applied to all the selected tracks with 2d motion (the low pass is just awesome lo-fi madness).

There is a manager app, the mac one looks like a flash app. It connects online and you have to sign up for an account.

In the manager are another hundred or so samples and you can move around any sample to anywhere. So in effect rather than having a row for each “type” of instrument, you could fill it with 12 drum samples.

There is no way to add your own sample…. BOOOO !!!

That said the 5th row is a sample row, you can record using a mic or the audio in and then you get 1 hit or loop on that sample, there are 2 A/B that you can fill, but you can only play one at a time.

It doesn’t show up in OSX as a drive (expect when I first plugged it in it appeared as a CD but that stopped once I installed the manager.

I’ll post the USB info.

The manager has a “store” section, so that makes me think they will be pretty restrictive about allowing anyone to add their own samples.

I have no idea how to hack something like this the USB connect bit, but my wish list would be simple:

- An ability to add your own loops to each of the 12 slots.
- The ability to download a recorded song
- Maybe the ability to add future fx

I also posted to the myucreate forums, I was the second post after a spammer:

http://www.myucreate.com/forums/Default.aspx?g=posts&m=4

I just got a ucreate music, and I can see a huge market for this device with electronic music production. It has the potential to be the speak and spell of the 21st century for electronic circuit benders and tinkerers.

I’m curious if this is a market that Mattel or Radica has considered and whether they will embrace it.

Embracing it would mean sharing some information that would allow people to go in and get down and dirty with the circuits and or the software that manages and is run on the ucreate.

Off the top of my head, I would love to be able to add my own samples to the 12 positions in the trigger board, I can’t see any easy way to do this with the manager. The only options seem to be limited to the samples available in the downloadable library.

I did notice a “store” section, and I could see it being seen that having the ability to add your own samples might limit users potential upsell to buying from a sample store (itunes style). If that is the case I think it’s shortsighted, as there will always be a market for more junior or less advanced users who just want samples that work, and those more advanced users who want to be able to play their own samples specifically.

I’d love to hear peoples thoughts on this. I’m hoping a solution can be found whether official or otherwise.

Thank you for producing such a well put together piece of hardware at such a reasonable price. I’ll be buying them for maybe 10 people from age 3 to age 43 this christmas.

I’m really hoping that radica, mattel or someone realize the potential sales they have the opportunity to amass IF they embrace a community that might not want to use this device in the exact way they have intended. If they in anyway open up any information that would allow 3rd party open source development of tools that can link to this hardware the have the potential to become the next huge thing that every electronic producer from the basement DJ to hip-hop moguls will have to own. Why do I think it will be that big? A combination to three things – it does a lot, not too much and it’s cheap. I own 2 stylophones. Stylophone have sold millions over the last 20 years. It’s cheap, it has a great sound and it’s tweakable. Geeks (and be honest that’s what every electronic music producer is (to quote Moby))… geeks love to tweak.

So I will be tweaking.

I’m going to crack mine open as soon as I can find the time and will post some internal shots.

I also will be posting the local copies of the .lop file and .sng file which I’m guessing is what is loaded onto the ucreate when you change the samples using the manager application.

I also have a log file, which might contain useful info to someone.

I’m at a bit of a lose though. Hacking USB protocols and handshakes and drivers is not something I have ever done, so I’m hoping some sort of community will rise up around this and then even if Mattel don’t see the opportunity we can try and make it work for us anyway.

More info to come.