Artiphon Portable Synth, Looper, MIDI Controller

Although this excellent little ORBA has some decent sounds(one lead patch in particular) you can load others via a smartphone app. But, where ORBA really shines is its MPE abilities. Supper fast midi response and using a MAX script for Abelton the asspects of the ORBA are easily map-able to any of your VST/midi synths/devices. You will be amazed by new musical expressions provide by the ORBA’s unique form factor. I was going to get Korg’s little kit synth and I am soooo very pleased that I selected the ORBA instead

I’ll outright say it, I’m currently learning to do sound design. I’m no master. But I’m also no fool and am often called a tech wunderkind. I had issues getting this working out of the box. I was not able to make any of the function buttons work (meaning holding the menu button and pressing a sound pad, you know…the thing it MUST do to work at all?). After a firmware update, several restarts, and many, many attempts, it suddenly started working perfectly. I’m not sure why, cause I’m not doing anything differently, but I’ll take it.

There’s some ups and downs here. I will list them next, but first off I want to say that this is the Orba 1, not the 2. There’s big, important differences. The software for the orba 1 is clunky and looks and operates like it was made cheaply in 2002. The Orba 2 software looks like it was made in 2020. The orba 1 can only have a couple of parallel tracks and they max at 30 seconds. The orba 2 can have many, many tracks of up to 5 minutes. There’s other smaller differences like age of hardware, sound quality, bluetooth compatibility, and battery that are all better on the 2, but now on to the pros and cons:

Pros:
-Inexpensive
-Easy to use
-Simple design
-Excellent entryway to learning to do sound design, DJ, or other EDM (electronic music) experience
-tolerable battery
-decent audio quality
-fair bit of pre-made sounds you can use from the app
-customizable
-connects to PC/Mac/iOS software like Ableton, meaning you can actually use it to record or perform professionally if you wanted

Cons:
-poor ability to properly execute functions
-easy to accidentally spin the device and lose which pad is which
-less than professional quality sound samples
-pretty bad when compared to the Orba 2
-existing “instructions” are laughable and tell you basically nothing. You’re on your own
-pretty pathetic, sad looking and running software compared to the Orba 2 software

My biggest complaint is about making loops. To make a loop you hold the menu button (it’s the “A” in the middle) and hit “REC”. Not only do the combo buttons not often work, it’s extremely hard to time it. You also will have a hard time knowing when your 30 seconds of recording is about to end. the LEDs give you a general idea of timing, but it’s very imprecise and makes it very discouraging to use. Things get out of time and messy. Furthermore, it plays an adjustable metronome any time you record. It’s nice, but DJs need a flawless sense of timing and the metronome is very hard to set right. When your 30 seconds of recording are up, it goes straight into recording the next 30 seconds. It doesn’t stop or alert you, so you can easily go over time by accident and end up with this bizarre, awkwardly timed set of beats or notes that come and go out of nowhere. Getting the right sense of timing on when to stop a loop is by far the most important thing to learn and it’s complicated by poor design and being a two-button process that throws off your timing. If you aren’t flawless, you’ll miss your mark AND change to a different set of sounds in the process without ever realizing it, totally screwing up your recording.

Lastly, when it comes to recording, once you record a 30 second loop, it’s over. There’s no deleting individual loops. You delete all recordings or none. So if you’re recording your 5th set of sounds on top of 4 existing loops and you screw up, you gotta start completely over. Good for practice, but highly impractical. A lot of this could have been solved by making the record button a separate, single button you just tap the second you’re done.

I’m still learning, but if I decide I like it, I’m returning it and ordering an Orba 2. I’ll admit it taught me a fair bit about synths and loops, hence why I gave it an extra start instead of the 2 stars I wanna give it. It taught me that this will be harder than I expected. I certainly didn’t expect it to be easy, but I was a professional musician for years and thought that’d help me out more.

Great product .. it’s my new midi friend

(quick preface: I’m an extremely literate software engineer and music producer… all the problems I experienced, I properly troubleshooted, followed their guides, submitted tickets, etc. It was all a huge waste of time.)

I’ll start by saying I really loved the concepts these guys were doing. I bought the INSTRUMENT 1 by them very early on and it was a disaster. The software was terrible, it didn’t connect the way I expected to the PC, and it basically just didn’t work in a functionally usable way for a midi device (maybe standalone it was bearable? But who wants to listen to some crappy onboard synth?). I REALLY want to like this company. I tried for weeks to troubleshoot and make the INSTRUMENT 1 work right, it never did. I returned it. No problem, just a bit of a bummer. Fast forward like 5 years… and I was skeptical of the ORBA because of what happened with the INSTRUMENT 1. But I figured they must have worked out the kinks and it was way cheaper. Seemed like a fun way to share music production with some friends. When it finally came, I opened it up and right away it was super fun to play with! I plugged it into the PC to connect it to my DAW, downloaded all the software for it and then ran it through a firmware update.

Whoops. Firmware update error. No biggie, I’ll just hard reset it. Hmm… hard reset didn’t work, better read the manual. There’s a special procedure for unbricking a device from a botched firmware update. I followed that. Still bricked. Well… that was fun.

Artiphon, I tried with you guys, I really did. The software you are writing is … unconscionable, honestly. How could you keep releasing such breaky stuff? This happening two times to me in a row with two of your products can’t be a coincidence. I’m done with you, I hope you get your act together but I won’t be trying again with anything you make. It’s been a disappointing waste of time.

Ich kann manche vorhergehenden Rezensionen nicht nachvollziehen. Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass eine ältere Firmware zugrunde lag. Das Gerät lässt sich super einfach mit der App auf dem Smartphone (Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro) verbinden. Man kann nach dieser Verbindung die Sounds sehr schnell ändern. Auch der erste 4-Spur Song gelang nach kurzer Übungszeit sehr schnell. Die fertigen Loops oder Tracks kann man ebenfalls in der App speichern, damit sie nicht verlorengehen.
Ein Kleinigkeit ist mir aufgefallen. Windows-PC Benutzer sollten keinesfalls versuchen, die App auf Windows 7 Betriebssystemen zu installieren. Die App wird sich installieren, aber wegen inkompatibler Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Komponenten nicht funktionieren. Man braucht definitiv Windows 10.
Mittlerweile ist der Firmwarestand 15.40 und es sind viele kleine Sachen verbessert worden.
Natürlich erfordert das Gerät ständige Übung. Ich empfehle die Tutorial Videos auf der Herstellerseite.
Ich empfehle das Artiphon ORBA uneingeschränkt weiter. Für mich als Musiker erfüllt es besonders den Zweck , spontane Ideen festhalten zu können. Ganz toll ist es wenn man es zusammen mit dem Akai MPK Mini Play benutzt (siehe Fotos)
Noch eine Info zum Schluss: Sollte der Akku mal komplett leer sein, braucht das Gerät etwa 6 Stunden um voll geladen zu sein. Das sollte man schon wissen.
Ich gebe das Teil auf jeden Fall so schnell nicht wieder her

Mi hijo lleva años pidiendo una mesa y como no alcanzo a tanto, le regale esto. Esta encantado con el y lo lleva a todas partes para hacer “su musica”. Genial como regalo si a la persona le gusta la musica.