First, and most importantly, I’d like to thank you for being a loyal Tempest user. We appreciate all of your support, feedback, and especially your creative use of the Tempest over the course of its 6-year development. It is now a mature product that has undergone many changes and improvements.
When the Tempest was first conceived, we never imagined the many ways you would ultimately put it to use. As such, over time, we've done our best to add as many features as we deemed implementable within the Tempest's technical framework. We've listened to your requests and have enhanced its operation, editing, and performance capabilities. While there are still some minor bugs remaining, we’ve addressed the bugs affecting the Tempest’s essential operation and feel that it is stable, reliable, has abundant functionality, and is very fun to play.
Though some of you continue to request new features and offer useful suggestions for improvement, we’ve reached what we consider the limits of the instrument's available memory and processing ability. For these reasons, we consider this release (OS 1.4.5.1) to be our final Tempest OS release.
Again, we deeply appreciate your enthusiasm for the Tempest. As we move forward, we are committed to creating still more ground-breaking instruments in the future.
-Dave
Well, ain't this a kick in the nuts. I'm glad you're so proud of yourself, Dave.
Sorry, y'all, but I'm out. It's time for me to go fight this battle for myself in front of a proper judge. But I encourage each and every one of you to keep fighting for what you
paid for. And I don't mean wining about the features you
wish had been implemented; but rather
demanding that the ones you bought the Tempest for,
six years ago, that
still don't work correctly, actually get fixed. You have been defrauded. Period. Trust me, I've fought this battle before and won. You have rights as a consumer, and I encourage you to apply them.
I'd like to add a few words to Dave's statement above. Though I may have chosen differently, I understand Dave’s decision to finish Tempest development with this update. He’s devoted far more effort and resources to Tempest than any of his other products, and I feel that even with some remaining minor bugs, Tempest is incredibly deep and remarkably functional, and in my opinion has no competition for what it does. The interesting thing about a a product that stores your music is that it’s an invitation to an infinite number of feature requests, because everyone’s needs for music creation are unique. I actually would have preferred a simpler Tempest with less features, but I admire Dave and his team for working so hard to implement so many of your requests, and those efforts have probably made it a better product than I originally envisioned. On balance, if you look at the totality of things Tempest can do and its vast internal complexity, I think it’s pretty amazing and may never be equalled. I certainly couldn’t have made Tempest on my own and appreciate that Dave was willing to devote so many of his resources to this collaboration of ideas.
I guess this is where we come to a crossroads, Roger. I too would have "preferred a simpler Tempest", like the one I originally purchased for instance! Wherein those parameters that are supposed to "sync" actually sync, and simple implementations like the arpeggiator actually work consistently across their various modes.
Details, details though, right?
What a waste of time and energy this has been. I can honestly say, I regret having ever aspired to this instrument. I could have bet my money on software, had a thousand times more functionality and flexibility, and suffered just as many bugs and instabilities.
I will never purchase another DSI instrument again, nor will anyone I rub elbows with if I can help it.
Good luck, everyone. Stand up for yourselves. We are not as lucky to have Dave Smith, as he is lucky to have us.
This is me, signing off...