Fully agree, its the most exciting piece of hardware for my eurorack by a far stretch
I was at superbooth, having a chat with Mark Harris @Technobear, and I can guarantee you that an insane amount of new tools are coming our way!
The graphics are also looking pretty, the SSP got a complete overhaul. Cant wait to get my hands on the update!
Great news! I would like to thank Bert and Mark for the new developments. Looking forward to it.
I’ve just got back from Superbooth - dogs are pleased 
sorry, I ended up running around every day at the show (as well as being at the Percussa booth), so really didn’t have time to post anything, as I intended.
I’m too frazzled today from travelling to post anything.
but I will post some details over next day or two, let you know what’s coming.
(generally those I showed seemed happy ;))
as for release of this plugins… that’ll be a couple of weeks at least as Ive family visiting - so really don’t have time to till they leave. (we also we need the OS beta release before I can release).
but close, just a matter of dotting some Is and crossing some Ts.
I also hope, at that time, I’ll also get some time for some video content.
Wow! I’m also using modular synths to do visuals, it could be so awesome to be able to create graphics with the SSP that could be compatible with the LZX eurorack format.
hmm, a couple of things to bare in mind on this…
a) no graphics output.
there is no hdmi/composite output on the SSP, so we only have things going to the SSP screen.
so no way to feed LZX a video signal.
b) open gl is a digital coding platform
its not going to be help you code an analog signal
not trying to dismiss the idea, just not sure its going to fit to your expectations.
(that said, Im not quite sure what exactly you had in mind ;))
The beta card image from superbooth has now been made available in the software updates section - Update 29052022 [Superbooth 2022 BETA SD Card image - GPU accelerated graphics, improved performance, new plugin SDK and more]
That’s great news, thanks Bert! Very excited to give this a try.
A couple of questions to hopefully help me and others get cranking on the new update:
I couldn’t find any new SYNTHOR documentation referenced in the post or downstream next to the image download link in the s3 bucket etc. Pardon if I missed something obvious. If there is not any new documentation I’d like to confirm that there are no changes in this update to the SYNTHOR user interface. Is that a reasonable expectation? If that’s not the case and there are in fact changes to the interface but no new documentation yet, then should SSP users expect something official at some point in addition to what is already on the community maintained docs wiki, and any timeline on that if so?
Regarding the item “Upgraded operating system (new linux kernel, updated drivers, rootfs etc)” - does this release include the kernel source and .config used to compile the kernel for the SSP hardware anywhere? To be crystal clear so @bert and the community doesn’t read anything further into this question: I am not asking if the release includes SYNTHOR source, nor am I asking Percussa to open source any proprietary efforts. I am simply asking if this release includes the kernel source & .config file and if it doesn’t…no problem! I am just trying to gain clarity on the details of a particular release for me and the SSP community, which is what I sincerely hope we can depend on these forum release threads to accomplish.
Thanks very much and congratulations on the release!
Best,
Edit: I’ve updated (2) to better reflect my inquiry to @bert and the core dev team as well as to make sure this post stays on topic for the release. Thanks @thetechnobear for the quick response and for the additional info you sent out of band.
Great news 
I have a fairly quick internet connection, however the download of the file is very slow (in my case from the Netherlands)… maybe offer a mirror for euro zone for big files…
16-20 hours download and any connection disruptions cancels the download… I’m on my third go now…
Thanks for all you work… can’t wait to test it all out…
the UI works exactly the same as before - nothing had changed in this regard.
also, for clarity, with the exception of 3rd party plugins (which need to be update to new sdk) , SYNTHOR is fully backwards compatible with previous version.
the SSP is not open source ( * ) , either hardware or software - source for buildroot and synthor will not be released.
the sdk, however, will contain the buildroot release, so basically all libraries and headers you need to build not only plugins, but also other apps for the SSP.
btw: this is off-topic, discussions on open source, or building apps etc for SSP would be better off in new topic, as 99.9% of user base are reading this topic for juicy news on update
talking of which Ive just released my plugins updated for this build!
( * ) open source
I’m an open source developer, so share your enthusiasm for things being open - and Ive discussed this many times with Bert, making the case for open source.
however, at the end of the day, developers put a lot of their own time in developing such products,its quite an investment - so it is rightfully their decision … and as a dev I respect that .
(I saw an accusation on Facebook that Percussa were obligated to release code, this is 100% false, an a misunderstanding of licences etc… as Percussa do not use GPL code)
again, a bit off-topic, if you want to discuss, create a new topic.
@bert Im also experiencing problems here with a fairly fast (Fibre) connection was just on my 4th download, which also stopped itself and now the downloads are stopping almost immediately. been trying since mid morning 
thanks for your reply
i have no control over amazon’s s3 servers… maybe there is an issue on their end that will resolve itself.
i recommend you use a browser download plugin so you can resume downloads.
Thanks for your reply, will try again later. what browser download plugin would you recommend?
setting up replication will take significant time and will add to hosting costs, so not something i can get into right now.
i suggest you use a tool to resume downloads. it might also be a temporary issue on amazon’s s3 servers.
Wondering if anyone can offer some assistance. Ive finally got the file to download and it appears to be the same as the one I downloaded (which I thought was corrupt) this morning.
I’m trying to flash the image to the original 32Gb sandisk extreme card on the Mac, I’ve updated BalenaEtcher and Keka to the latest versions as thought that might be the problem and even tried unzipping with Unarchiever as suggested in the other thread. The extracted file is of the same file name as the zip file and Balena etcher isn’t letting me open it unless I delete the last few letters of the filename suit ens in .img. once I do that it will pop up a warning that the file is missing partitions. once its flashed to card and varified and put in SSP and powered on nothing happens like there’s no power getting to the SSP just a black screen. Also when I unzip the downloaded file I’m only getting 16.99GB file which is unexpected.
So to summerise:
*File size Unzipping at lower than expected size 16.99GB
*File not being recognised by Balena as image once unzipped.
*If manually change name of file to .img then it’ll flash but with warnings about a missing partition table.
*Has anyone managed to flash this image from the download link successfully yet?
Thanks
You need to extract the ZSTD file downloaded first, using Keka, if you are on Mac OSX. Once it is extracted, you can write it to the SD card using balena etcher.
Drag the ZSTD file into Keka, and drop it on the text that appears “drop here to extract”. Do not drop it on the text that says “drop here to compress” which is at the top of the Keka window.
On Windows it’s easier. Just open the file with WinRAR and extract. Then write to SD card using win32diskimager.
Hi @bert. Yes I understand I need to extract the ZSTD file I downloaded using Keka, admittedly I’m not drag and dropping the file but rather right clicking and selecting Keka as the file to open it with, this is how I’ve always opened compressed files on a Mac that arn’t opened with the default Mac unzipped program and it has always decompressed them fine previously. I will try dragging and dropping next time and see if that makes any difference. I have used Balena Etcher previously to flash the SD card on the SSP and that seemed pretty straightforward.
download compressed image file>>>uncompress compressed file using Keka>>>Point Balena to location of uncompressed file to flash to SD card>>>Select SD card as target for flashing>>>Flash card>>>wait to verify Flash>>>unmount card.
It seems to me that the file I’m downloading isn’t quite right for some reason, maybe its corrupt or its getting corrupted while downloading, which is why I was asking if anyone had had success with the download file, and when the file is uncompressed it should be close to 32GB right not 16.99GB?
I’m using a download manager for Chrome now so will try again in 4 hours time once downloaded. This will be the 5th attempt today.
Yep, I was able to extract and get the new version up and running on my SSP using my relatively up to date Intel Mac last night. I used the following procedure:
WARNING: THIS PROCEDURE WILL WIPE ALL DATA ON THE DESTINATION SD CARD, AND IF YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH THESE TOOLS YOU PROBABLY SHOULD NOT TRY THIS. TREAD CAREFULLY
Install zstd using brew install zstd
Decompress the image file by running
zstd -d ssp-sandisk-extremepro-32gb-290520221129.img.zstd
/dev/diskN path where N is the device number corresponding to the SD card I want to flash I was able to successfully flash the card by running:sudo dd if=ssp-sandisk-extremepro-32gb-290520221129.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=8m
/dev/rdiskN vs /dev/diskN gave me a little better performance for certain SD cards but this process will still take a while so be patient. You can get MacOS’s dd to print progress to stderr by running this every so often or just put it in a one second loop:pgrep -x dd | xargs -r sudo kill -INFO
[0] It’s possible that using balenaEtcher as recommended in the installation instructions would have allowed me to flash the 32GB card successfully somehow. In my case I prefer a larger SD card so that I can have more room for samples, thus it was totally fine for me to just switch over to the 128GB card and go from there. For those who only have 32GB cards around you may need to use belenaEtcher instead of dd, I’m not sure as I didn’t need to get a 32GB card working for my environment.
That is probably because you are not using the original card that came with the SSP.
I went ahead and ran md5sum on the downloaded file and the uncompressed one that worked for me if you would like to compare. I think MacOS ships with md5 so you might need to run that against the files if you don’t have md5sum installed via brew et al.
8017dfa1b42caca566f8442d2f89ac1e ssp-sandisk-extremepro-32gb-290520221129.img
9cca3179e3d6d2ae7ea089db170c93ad ssp-sandisk-extremepro-32gb-290520221129.img.zstd