Anyone losing patience with Arturia's support for the 16Rig?

Fuse AudioFuse
#1

It’s over 2 years since launch and about a year and 9 months since my purchase and I think my patience has just about run out waiting for Arturia to provide meaningful improvements to 16Rig firmware in terms of addressing the obvious deficiencies that have been raised by people on this forum over and over who’ve been trying to use it as a live mixer or as a dawless centerpiece.

I bought this device on the basis that the 16Rig could be used in this role because I believed Arturia’s marketing (which continues to sell device on this basis) but it’s simply just not up to this task specifically because of deficiencies in its MIDI implementation.

From the very first day I joined this forum, people have been asking for modest improvements in terms of MIDI control but we been given absolutely nothing. Not even something as trivial as being able to set the mute/solo state (without having to blindly toggle) of channels. I can only conclude that Arturia have zero interest in (or seem actively against) providing any improvements to the MIDI control.

I’m not taking this decision lightly - I’ve invested at least a 100 hours trying to make this device the “centerpiece” of my collection of synths and instruments - including writing a considerable amount of custom Python code to overcome the lack of non-banked MIDI control or to provide visual feedback on my controllers on the mute/solo state of channels.

But with Arturias complete lack of interest, I’m just not willing to invest any more time in working around the limitations. Life is too short and I rather spend time on making music. If the next firmware release contains no MIDI improvements, I’m going to cut my losses and sell.

It’s a fine audio interface but it’s effectively useless for dawless live/mixing.

The biggest shame is how simple it would be for Arturia to fix this, how close they are to having a killer product. If I can write a bunch of Python to translate MIDI to provide so that I can use my MIDI controllers to set channel levels without having to guess which channel a slider is going to affect, then I can only conclude that it’s not the development effort, it’s the motivation on Arturia’s part that’s the problem.

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#2

I probably won’t sell mine. It’s working well enough for my needs now, but it is disappointing how many of the distinctive features that made it interesting to me are so half-baked. Particularly the MIDI support and clock out port. I do wish I had listened to the people who told me to buy RME or MOTU instead.

You see a lot of posts like this across the forum for different Arturia hardware products. It seems like many of their customers feel neglected by them, while they continue to launch new products constantly.

I write this as I attempt to download the Pigments update, but ASC keeps crashing or being unable to log in. I guess their server must be overloaded, and their app must not be written to handle that gracefully. Like so many things, they don’t seem to be able to deliver what they promise. It’s a shame, I was such a big Arturia fan a few years ago, but they seem to continually disappoint us. I hope they can find a way to focus on improving their quality and ability to follow through on their promises.

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#3

I told myself I was done with Arturia after I received one of the pre-order Keystep Pro units, and it was a complete lemon (there appears to be a lot of them from that time). Support was great for a while, but eventually after multiple firmware resets, and bugs still persisting, I decided it was a bad product and they clearly weren’t going to replace it. I should have just returned it during my warranty period but I wanted it to work really bad.

It’s a similar thing, too, where one of the main features advertised was the Transpose and Scale features, where the advertising made the transpose look like it latched by default (like the original Keystep), and it took probably 3-4 years for that simple feature to get added at all. I have bought so much used gear and have had many trips to the tech - but I have never been so frustrated with a brand NEW piece of gear.

Nevertheless, I bought the 16Rig for the 32 total available inputs which I wanted, for the low price. So far, I haven’t been disappointed - however I was moving over from a mixer/interface (ZedR16 that I now use as ADAT expansion), and I was hoping to get a little bit of that mixer functionality, albeit no EQ’s and completely digitally mixed. I tried, and realized that yea, it sucks at that. I just make a bunch of presets and will edit using the faceplate if I’m not writing/recording in the DAW.

I think it’s already too limited as a mixer, 4 Aux outs when there are 8 outputs total is not enough. I do wish they’d add some sort of Mackie HUI compatibility. I’d consider it as a live mixer if so. For the last 4 years, I’ve used the KMI K-Mix as a programmable live mixer with 8 outs, and it’s great, just wish it had 16 inputs!

#4

I wanted to get RME as well, and was told to by many others, but for the amount of inputs, you’d be paying twice the price. It could be worth it, but can it function as a mixer? I do know it has TotalMix, but I wasn’t sure how controllable it was/MIDI implementation.

The one thing that DOES get me down about the Arturia vs RME, is the latency. It’s really not the best, but also I barely use plugins and can get away with using lower buffer sizes, and direct monitoring when I need to.

#5

More than a month later and still no reply from any staff.

Artuia staff, when can we expect for midi issues to be resolved. Ive had mine for over a year now and there hasn’t been any reql solution to midi issues reported over a year ago.

Sincerely,
Patiently Waiting 16rig Owner

#6

In general, while I really like Arturia products, their support for interfaces has not been stellar. I have the AF Studio + 8pre and they are great interfaces. Mic preamps, reamp capability, combined can do ATMOS, SPDIF. Love all their features. But firmware support stopped way too soon after release.

Also AFCC is buggy. I cannot run the last version and they haven’t updated it for a long time.

Think next time I will go with someone for whom interfaces is a key business rather than a side business.

#7

Arturia are spinning too many plates at this point, and everyone wants their own particular spinning plate to have priority. Should have stayed as a software company writing the best synth emulations in the world. There was no worldwide shortage of good hardware-synths or audio-interfaces.

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#8

Nobody forced them to expand out to so many product lines. The 16Rig was truly innovative and unlike everything else on the market when it was released. Arturia hyped it heavily as their new flagship. The least they could do is finish all of the features they announced at launch.

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#9

I wish. But I just don’t think they’re that kind of company. It’s too bad.

#10

It is indeed innovative, and still is Arturia’s flagship audio interface.

Which features do you think were “announced at launch” and not provided?
I’m not talking about “wish lists” or requests that were made by users since the launch, but features that Arturia had officially announced and not provided yet.

I understand the requests to update the MIDI control of the mixer so it could be controlled without switching pages, but the feature is there and works the way it is described. The fact that some users would like it to work differently (and that can be a valid point) is not the same as saying that Arturia did not provide the feature.

One thing for sure is that Arturia has not pre-announced “Immersive monitoring” and that came as a new surprise major feature in firmware update 2.0.

#11

Look, I’m not really looking to start an argument with other customers here. If you have a 16Rig and you’re 100% happy with it, that’s great. Truly!

I’m not claiming that they completely fabricated features that don’t exist at all. I’m saying that they shipped features that feel unfinished and not very useful in practice. They did just enough to be able to write a long feature list on the website and the box, but clearly didn’t actually test them with people who want to rely on them in their workflow. The ones I’m thinking of have been detailed in other posts on this forum, but mainly MIDI control and the clock out. Yes, they technically exist, but is anyone happy with them? I was happy to see improvements to both in v2.0, but they still have major flaws, and in fact there was a regression in the clock out feature (start/stop gate) that is still unresolved.

I can only speak for myself, but that felt somewhat insulting to me as an early adopter. I have no interest or use for this, and it seemed clearly aimed at expanding the market for the product, rather than improving the satisfaction of the customers who bought it for what it already claimed to do.

Surprise features can be great. I really jumped on the Arturia bandwagon because of the excellent long-term improvements to the MicroFreak. But, personally, at least, I didn’t feel like it was flawed to begin with, just that it started great and only got better with later updates. And that was for a relatively cheap synth!

My experience with the 16Rig has really put me off, though, especially after seeing other posts on this forum from people who bought things like the KeyStep Pro, AstroLab and the KeyLab mk 3, which also seem to have disappointed early adopters with flaws that go unresolved for a long time.

I’m not so unhappy that I’ve sold it—I’m hanging on and still hoping they come back around to fix these problems. As an I/O-rich interface it still does its main job well. I like the routing matrix UI better than a lot of the other options out there. But it has made me pause about jumping into their other new products and lose my enthusiasm for them as a company in general.

I’m not trying to talk any other fans out of their enthusiasm, I just hope the company will do better in the future. They need to understand that they’re letting many of their customers down. I don’t know if any decision makers at Arturia see this forum, but I know some employees do. They’ve been helpful, but probably don’t have control over how the company allocates resources or decides which products to focus on. I hope they can pass feedback up the chain.

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#12

The direct through/re-amp “feature” is quite possibly the most half baked feature I’ve come across. it’s noisy, got a weak signal at best, and support has been limited to “Have you tried a factory reset?”… I’ve had two different 16rigs. One was a first run of the interface, and it failed for reasons unrelated to the re-amping after about 1.5 years… Sweetwater’s warranty replaced it with a new one, and I HOPED the re-amping issues were just defective first run hardware… Nope. It’s just terrible.