Thanks for the quick response!
I would recommend for the the musicians who have been complaining about off pitch playback to tune their instruments, go to their DAW software (Protools, Cubase, Ableton, etc.), pitch up a song by 0.14%, and play your instrument while playing back that pitched up song. Listen to hear if playback is close enough in pitch to your instrument to be acceptable. Then post back here to let us know.
It’s always a good idea to test with end users before release, so that problems like this don’t arise in the first place. I understand that, with the way corporate management tends to madly and blindly grasp for profit, appropriate testing may not be provided for in the budget. But certainly at least some small scale testing with users is almost always possible, even if it’s only unofficial and organized by the engineers alone. That will prevent problems like this from emerging in the first place (provided that the engineers listen carefully to the users, then redesign if necessary and retest until users give the *thumbs up*).
Operating this way (i.e. user testing and revamping the product until users give the *thumbs up* prior to release) is better for sales. You’ll get 5 star average reviews on Amazon, on user forums and by word-of-mouth. Sales will increase as a result.
It’s also better for society (less “junk” products on the market therefore less material and labor waste, less of users’ time wasted struggling with poorly designed products).
Edit:
bobletteross: The unit will consume energy at a slightly faster pace with the fix. With the fix, a full battery charge will last ~3% less in terms of playback time, compared to how it is now. Whether that decreases the useful life of the unit depends on how you use it. (do you run the battery down to empty or recharge more frequently?, etc.) However, Li batteries seem to have an amazing lifespan, personally I’m not concerned.
The issue affects the playback speed of all audio file formats, since all audio files play back using the same clock mechanism. Pitch error will vary depending on the Sample Rate of the file, due to the nature of the clock mechanism.
I’m pretty sure that the pitch error occurs on all units of both the Fuze and the Clip, since it is a firmware issue. Since the V1 and V2 units have different firmware versions it’s possible that they may behave differently, but I would imagine that the relevant parts of the firmware code are similar if not identical.
Message Edited by maxplanck on 02-19-2009 10:54 AM