Comments on: Ucreate Music

By: zool

zool — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 01:24:50 +0000

not sure about this but i think you may be able to use an arduino’s tx and rx pins for the UART

might just end up being what the usb is sending though

i might get one of these and try

By: Alex Andersson

Alex Andersson — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:56:41 +0000

I have one of these now and I have to say that I am more impressed with the real-time stuttering you can do with a microphone or line input. The sample/hold feature is brilliant and I can’t believe how many options you get with the Rewind/Spin Looper and Forward/Reverse Looper FX. Plug in a mic and use them and u’ll know what i mean!

The FX couldn’t possibly be VST. There is another file format in there called .ufx … and that is more likely the actual effect, whilst the .dll files are used for the music manager software.

By: JP

JP — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:11:53 +0000

http://nomeist.com/ucreate-what-is-available-to-look-at/202

some info over here, but this is only for OSX, I haven’t looking on a windows machine.

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:57:19 +0000

I know this is a stupid question but where the hell are the .lop files, I cant find them!

By: der Warst

der Warst — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:34:21 +0000

I’ve opened mine up and looked around on the main PCB. There’s two unused pin headers there, one with 5 pins saying something cryptic and one with 3 pins (I think it was 3) saying UART. Which means “Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter”. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Asynchronous_Receiver_Transmitter

People who know what they’re doing might be able to do all sorts of stuff with that. Like debugging or writing an entirely new firmware for it…

Sadly none of us seems to be that kind of person.

By: Cementimental

Cementimental — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:45:32 +0000

OK I’ve given up on raw file hacks entirely for now. A foolproof way of replacing the loops which is good enough for my noise purposes is simply to sample in both A and B slots, save to your sets in the app then re-load it back onto the u-create, fish out the resulting .lop files (which conveniently seem to have unique filenames every time!) and collect them in a folder… then rename a copy of them using the default loop filenames and upload them as discussed previously.

Someone out there must be able to figure out a more elegent solution pleasE! I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s only a year or so before mattell discontinue these things and the site vanishes leaving them un-updatable

By: der Warst

der Warst — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:25:52 +0000

Hey, I bought one of those because of finding this Blog. Thanks for that. Sadly, with mine the USB socket seemed to be physically broken and it crashed the first time I tried to upload loops (not even my own). These things seem to be quite vulnerable in that point. I got a refund, but would have preferred a normal functioning unit.
Apart from that, it might be worth finding out if there’s a way to ‘unbrick’ them in some way. I opened mine up and found some unused solder pads on the board, which could mean there might be a jtag connection possible or something of the likes. It kinda sucks that the only way of interfacing with this thing is this flash site…

By: Cementimental

Cementimental — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:07:33 +0000

Yes I killed it. I’m pretty sure I crashed it by uploading too many over-long samples…

Got another and going to proceed with caution; make samples either the exact right length or shorter (i want to be able to have things out of sync for my noisy purposes ^_^, don’t see any reason shorter samples should cause it a problem… I hope :-S) and also I’m going to only replace each file with the header data taken from the same sample I save it over… they seem to differ looking at the waveforms, and i guess it might be important.

Also I am working from a copy of the stock loops after a reset, the filenames start from 1 and it just generally seems sensible/easy, before i’d already mixed up the samples etcc.

By: Cementimental

Cementimental — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:34:47 +0000

Hmm i tried to put a whole bunch of new samples on it and it failed to upload + now won’t power up… lights just glow very faintly, hoping it’s just dead batteries and not fried it somehow. Will get some more tomorrow and check.!

By: Cementimental

Cementimental — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:09:12 +0000

OK my further findings:
Not sure exactly what the header is/says but by basically looking at the waveform and trying to avoid damaging it I’ve managed to:
* make a near-perfect sine wave (bit of a faint click) which additionally was a really short sample, not the full 5 sec, but seemed to play ok and not mess anything else up.
* paste like an extra 5-6 seconds AT THE END OF ONE OF THE STOCK LOOPS AND IT PLAYS THE WHOLE THING O_O with no apparent loss of any other samples etc.,..uhhh how much spare space does this thing have on it I wonder? (or would it maybe crash if i try and record a song?

anyway promising. Hope someone can properly crack this thing for more convenient and controllable mods tho.