更新日志

Panel stays a simulation

The Tonverk home page no longer offers to connect the hardware over Web MIDI. The link detected the device but the panel could never follow it: Tonverk transmits no knob-position CCs, and the messages it does send (transport CC broadcasts, clock) say nothing reliable about the track, page, or knob in front of you. Outbound control stays where it works - the MIDI page and the tutor's MIDI plans still send resolved CC/NRPN values to the device. Search descriptions and the AI tutor now follow the site's own section text.

The quiet Tonverk manual revision

Elektron replaced the Tonverk OS 1.4.0 manual five days after release without changing the OS number. The site now recognizes the August 31 PDF, uses its corrected figure positions and appendix title, and tracks the actual editorial changes: the PAGE SETUP playback parameter is SPEED rather than SCALE, KEY TRACKING no longer claims a fixed set of source pages, and INT TO MAIN offers only OFF and ON. Existing August 26 local copies are identified as outdated so they cannot be sliced with the revised document geometry.

Outdated local copies say so

Bring-your-own-manual copies stored before the OS 1.4.0 update went silent when the site's data moved on: their sections are keyed by the old release's chunk filenames, so on renamed sections the reader found no local text - and the component then rendered nothing at all, hiding both the text and the way to fix it. An outdated copy now announces itself everywhere it appears: sections that still resolve show the local text under a notice ('Your local copy is the OS 1.3.3 manual - this site now documents OS 1.4.0'), sections that don't bring back the drop card with the same notice, an update hint, and a remove control, and the status strip on guide, search, and tutor pages points at the update path. Dropping the newly released PDF replaces the copy in place. The Chinese and Japanese guide translations also caught up with the manual's new imprint (OS 1.4.0, August 26, 2026).

Search results that name the device

Search-facing metadata across the site now says which device a page is about. Every device sub-page - parameters, procedures, MIDI, manual sections, guides, search, tutor - carries the device name in its title ('Tonverk MIDI CC & NRPN Reference' instead of 'MIDI Control'), and descriptions describe the page for someone deciding whether to click, instead of reusing on-page UI notes. The release also fixes a real casualty of the OS 1.4.0 update: manual-section URLs embed a position number that shifted when 1.4.0 inserted its Overbridge section, which silently broke every previously indexed manual link - those URLs now redirect permanently to the section's current address, recovered by title slug (surviving renumbering) or section id.

New-in-OS badges

Everything the OS 1.4.0 manual added now announces itself. The seven new parameters, eight new procedures, and the new Overbridge section each carry a mint 1.4.0 badge - in the parameter table, the procedure list and detail pages, and on the manual section itself - and the device picker shows Tonverk's version line as 'OS 1.3.3 -> 1.4.0', so it is clear at a glance that the dataset already tracks the newest manual. The what's-new manifest is test-enforced the same way the errata list is: a badge pointing at a record that no longer exists, or one left up after the next OS bump, fails the build.

Tonverk OS 1.4.0

The whole Tonverk dataset now tracks the OS 1.4.0 manual. The release brings Overbridge (multitrack audio), a preset SORTING menu, pattern transpose, two new modulation macros (KEY TRACKING and VELOCITY MOD), an FX-slot swap, a rebuilt sampler source list, and new USB/audio-routing settings - all reflected here as seven new parameter records, eight new procedures, two new figures, and refreshed chunks, MIDI map, and search index. Elektron also fixed one of our documented errata: the chapter 19 key table no longer swaps C#1/D#1 for memorize/recall, which confirms the panel-print reading this site shipped. Two freshly misnumbered headings and one copy-paste error take its place in the errata list.

The course's second draft is complete

All fifteen lessons of Synthesis Basics now stand at second-draft depth. Lessons 7 through 15 — delay and reverb, drive and compression, the subtractive chain, FM, sampling, granular, the sequencer mindset, parameter locks and conditions, and the closing workflow — were rewritten in all three languages at two and a half to four times their old length, with concrete numbers throughout and fifteen new diagrams grounded in the toys' own constants. The rewrite also fact-checked the old text against the compiled data and the manuals, and that turned up more than course fixes: both the Digitone II and Digitakt II manuals print the TRACK LENGTH range as 2/16 to 64/64 in their key-combinations chapters — the Syntakt value — while their own sequencer chapters say 2/16 to 128/128. Those are now documented manual errata #7 and #8, the first found outside the Tonverk, and the affected procedures teach the correct range.

The tutor reads your copy

Three upgrades that build on the local manual. First, the AI tutor: when your own official PDF is loaded, the tutor's manual tools regain their full power — search returns real quoted snippets and sections return their complete text, all from your copy, all inside your browser, with the usual § citations and errata warnings. Without a local copy, nothing changes: the tutor locates sections and points to the official PDF pages, as before. Second, you can now discover the local reader where you actually start: the device home, the Getting Started hub, and the tutor each carry a one-line status strip that invites you to load your PDF — or shows which copy you are reading. Third, the synthesis course's second draft continues: filters, the filter envelope, and LFOs are rewritten at twice the depth with five new diagrams — real filter curves with resonance peaks in decibels, 12 versus 24 dB per octave side by side, the cutoff riding an ADSR contour, LFO shapes mapped to what they do to pitch and volume, and a rate scale that ties hertz to tempo divisions.

Your PDF now brings the figures

The local reader gains the manual's figures. Every figure is cut from your own PDF, in your browser: the boundary map now ships each figure's clip rectangle (coordinates are facts, like page numbers), and the reader renders that page region to a small local image — 96 figures on the Tonverk come to about 220 KB. The same rectangles clean up the text: labels that live inside a mapped diagram no longer flatten into the section prose as word soup. And because your PDF is kept locally, upgrades are silent — when the site ships a newer boundary map, the reader re-parses your stored copy by itself; there is nothing to drop again. As before, none of this touches the network: the file, the text, and the rendered figures never leave your browser.

Bring your own manual

The full manual reader returns — powered by your own copy. Download the official PDF from Elektron, drop it on any manual page, and the browser parses it right there: every section becomes readable full text again, and manual search gets its quoted snippets back. Nothing is uploaded or seen by the site — parsing, storage, and search all happen in your browser, and the copy persists on your device until you remove it. The site ships only the facts that make this possible: section boundaries, printed headings, page ranges, and the official PDFs' checksums, so a dropped file is verified to be exactly the manual version this site's data tracks; a wrong device or an unknown revision is told apart and turned away with a pointer to the official download. Page numbers and running chapter headers are stripped from the text; diagrams and tables come through as plain text for now — figures are the next phase.

The manual reader becomes a locator

Knobwerk no longer hosts the manual's text and figures. Instead, every manual section page is now a locator: the section's title and breadcrumb, its exact page range in Elektron's official PDF, a verified download link for the device, and previous/next navigation that keeps the whole manual tree walkable. Search works the same way — it finds the right section and hands you the page number instead of quoting the text. The Quickstart guides are rewritten from scratch in our own words: the same first-hour path (what the machine is, hooking it up, first sounds), every fact checked against the manual and §-cited, with one short official line quoted per device. The documented errata stay on their sections — those were always this project's own findings.

Lessons with real depth, and real diagrams

The synthesis course starts its second draft. The first three lessons are rewritten to a new standard — roughly twice the depth, concrete numbers everywhere (hearing ranges, typical envelope times, frequency bands), and plainer sentences — and they gain a new kind of teaching material: static diagrams. Six hand-drawn SVG figures now sit alongside the interactive toys: wave anatomy, the octave ladder, the four waveform recipes with their spectra, harmonics summing into a square, ADSR anatomy, and pluck-versus-pad contours. The remaining twelve lessons get the same treatment next.

The course is complete: fifteen lessons, twelve instruments

Synthesis Basics reaches its final form. The synthesis-methods module gives each device its home-game lesson — a playable mini synth for the full subtractive chain, an FM playground that overlays predicted sidebands on the real spectrum (Digitone II's world), a sampler that teaches repitch vs stretch with one slider and two machines (Digitakt II's lineup), and a granular cloud whose four handles map one-to-one onto Tonverk's GRAINER. The closing module teaches the Elektron grammar itself: a two-track step sequencer you edit while it runs, then parameter locks, probability, and trig conditions — the ideas that make sixteen steps feel alive. A final workflow lesson folds all fifteen into one repeatable design loop.

Effects intuition: space, energy, density

Two new lessons complete the effects module of the synthesis course. Delay and reverb are taught as the same raw material — copies of the sound, played late — with a pluck that leaves real silence for the echoes to live in. Drive and compression untangle the two effects everyone confuses: one changes tone, the other changes dynamics, and a live gain-reduction meter shows the compressor breathe with every kick. Lesson 7 was reworked after a real beginner test: the wet/dry concept now comes first, and the source leaves room to actually hear what each knob changes.

Synthesis Basics: hear it, then find it on your device

A new interactive course teaches electronic sound from zero — no device needed, every lesson makes sound right in the browser. Six lessons so far: pitch/loudness/timbre, waveforms and harmonics, envelopes, filters, the filter envelope, and LFOs. What no other synth course can do: every lesson ends by landing its concept on your actual hardware, deep-linking the exact parameter on all four devices' interactive panels. Trilingual from day one.

Every parameter, every language

The translation checkerboard is filled: all four devices now have complete Chinese and Japanese parameter descriptions — 2,436 translations in total across the catalog. Device-facing tokens (parameter names, key combos, machine and page names) stay in English exactly as they appear on the hardware, so what you read matches what the screen says. The beta badge also changed meaning: it now marks devices not yet verified against a physical unit (all data depth is equal across the four), so only Tonverk goes without one.

Syntakt and Digitakt II graduate

The beta badges come off. Both devices now carry the same depth stack as Tonverk and Digitone II — figures, semantic search, an interactive digital twin, and (new in this release) a golden retrieval set: a hand-verified exam of realistic queries that measures whether search actually finds the right manual section, procedure, and parameter. Their scores now gate every future change in CI, so search quality on all four devices can only be improved, never silently broken.

Every device gets its twin

The interactive panel twin — the clickable hardware simulation that Tonverk and Digitone II ship with — now runs on Syntakt and Digitakt II too. Press the panel keys, cycle the parameter pages, open the machine menu, and the simulated screen shows exactly what the compiled manual data says it should. Syntakt's FX track and its voice-type machine rules made this the deepest modeling work since the original twin.

The beta devices catch up

Syntakt and Digitakt II close most of the gap to the flagship devices: manual figures and semantic search land for both. And a resolution sweep built for that work caught a real bug on a graduated device — Digitone II's MIDI page had been showing wrong CC numbers for whole parameter pages, which is now fixed and regression-tested across all three Digi-series devices.

The manual gets its pictures back

Until now the manual pages carried only the PDF's words — every screen illustration, panel drawing, and signal-flow diagram was left behind. A new pipeline stage extracts them straight from the official PDFs and embeds them where they belong: 96 figures across Tonverk's sections and 128 across Digitone II's, each captioned with its source page.

The manual reads like a manual again

The manual pages were showing the PDF's raw text layer — accurate words in a monospace dump, with the print edition's bold sub-headings collapsed into bare lines and every typeset line break frozen in place. A typography pass now parses the structure back out and typesets it as prose, guarded by a zero-loss invariant: for every section of every device, the typeset output reproduces the source text character for character.

Review day

An external code review went under the microscope: every claim was verified against the code before acting. Eight fixes shipped — the most visible one being that manual pages now show only their own section's text instead of the page-sharing spillover from neighboring sections.

Where does everything live? — the deep-dive trilogy is complete

The flagship deep dive maps the machine's most invisible system: the SD card, the active project, and the one copy rule that explains every save-related surprise. It ships with a new interactive data map, in three languages — and, true to form, writing it uncovered the manual's newest documented contradiction.

The guide becomes a hub

The Get Started page no longer mixes the manual's chapters with this site's own material. The manual's quick-start content moved to its own page behind a single, clearly-badged entrance — so what comes from Elektron and what this project wrote is visible at a glance.

Why Subtracks? — the second deep dive

One track that holds eight samples, eight sequencer lanes, and a hidden ninth. The second deep dive explains the machine that answers "why should a drum kit cost eight tracks?" — shipped in English, Chinese, and Japanese on day one, with three hands-on experiments and the supertrack finally explained in the manual's own words.

路由的设计哲学 — ルーティングの設計哲学

The first deep dive now reads natively in Chinese and Japanese: every paragraph, callout, and experiment of "The routing philosophy" is hand-translated, with the § citations still linking to the manual and every device token untouched — exactly the discipline the rest of the site follows.

The tutor learns our own lessons

The AI tutor was the last feature without a measured baseline — so we measured it (78.6%), fixed what the numbers exposed, and measured again (85.7%). The headline: the tutor now corrects the manual's documented misprints instead of repeating them, cites a section for every claim, and can read the deep-dive articles — with their manual/official-tutorial/interpretation source labels intact.

The fine print

A data-reuse statement now says plainly what this project owns and what it doesn't: the hand-authored layers are original work (reuse with attribution and a link), while the compiled reference data originates from Elektron's manuals — no copyright claimed over Elektron's content. Alongside it, the public API endpoints gained a rate limit against bulk scraping; normal use and AI assistants are unaffected.

Readable by machines

This site's charter has always been "LLM-usable" — now it says so at the front door. AI assistants that browse the web get a curated map at /llms.txt, a complete one at /llms-full.txt, and structured data that tells search engines exactly what each page is.

The recovered procedures speak Chinese and Japanese

The six procedures recovered by the coverage audit are now fully translated, and the audit spirit turned inward: it found a blind spot in our own staleness gate and closed it.

Every numbered procedure accounted for — plus the story behind the project

Writing the routing deep dive caught a numbered procedure in the manual that had never become a playable record. So we swept the entire manual: every numbered step-list is now either extracted, or explicitly accounted for. Six procedures were recovered — including the ROUTING menu itself. And the About page now tells the story of why this project exists, in its maker's own words.

Deep dives: The routing philosophy

A new long-form layer, inspired by the community's beloved 'Merlin' guides: articles that explain why the machine is shaped the way it is, not just what the buttons do. The first piece decodes Tonverk's 16-track architecture — why only half the tracks make sound, and why the silent half is the point.

Hardware control from the panel — verified on a real Tonverk

First physical-device verification session. The verdict: the Tonverk receives CC/NRPN perfectly (confirmed live — panel to hardware works end-to-end) but transmits no parameter CCs, so the mirror direction flips: select any parameter on the interactive panel and drive the real device with a slider.

The manual follows your hands

Connect a Tonverk over USB and the interactive panel becomes a live mirror: turn any knob on the hardware and the on-screen panel highlights it, jumps to its page, and explains the parameter — with the value you're dialing shown in real time.

Digitone II graduates: live panel, semantic search, out of beta

The Digitone II gets the full depth treatment — an interactive panel you can operate (FM machine menus included), semantic + cross-lingual search, and a measured retrieval baseline. Its beta badge is gone.

中文・日本語 everywhere, and the manual talks to the panel

Every Tonverk parameter description now reads natively in Chinese and Japanese, lessons are fully localized, and every key name printed in the manual text is now a link that lights up that key on the interactive panel.

Knobwerk — a real name and a real home

The project moves to knobwerk.com under its new name, Knobwerk (knob + werk — gear culture, no trademarks harmed). Every page now carries proper search-engine metadata in all three languages, and old links redirect.

Learning paths, a tutor that demonstrates, and the full concepts set

The interactive manual now teaches: guided lessons with progress tracking, an AI tutor that shows parameters on a live panel inside the chat, two new concept playgrounds (per-track scale and the 16-track signal flow), and documented manual errata surfaced right where you read.

Procedure screens on the panel + beta badges

Procedure playback now renders each step's screen state inside the device's actual display — the same live screen the interactive panel uses — instead of a detached mockup below the controls. Non-Tonverk devices are marked beta at their entry points.

Semantic search — ask in your own words, or in 中文/日本語

Manual search gains an optional semantic mode that understands meaning rather than keywords: paraphrased questions and Chinese/Japanese queries now find the right sections, procedures, and parameters. Runs entirely in your browser — no server, no account.

Concept playgrounds, mod-destination badges, parameters everywhere linked

Two interactive playgrounds teach parameter locks and trig conditions by doing; every knob that an LFO can modulate now says so in the panel inspector; and the parameters table links every row to the interactive panel and its procedures.

Real search, wired to the panel

Manual search now understands multi-word and paraphrased queries instead of exact substrings, results unify sections, parameters, and procedures — and a parameter hit opens the interactive panel with the right machine assigned, the page on screen, and the knob selected.

Tutor retrieval hardening

The AI tutor searches and cites the manual more reliably: search results and section reads now serve each section's own cleaned text, the tutor can walk the manual tree instead of re-searching, and citations that don't match a real section get flagged.

Tonverk interactive panel

The Tonverk front panel becomes a live device: click keys to operate it — switch tracks, browse parameter pages, assign machines from the manual's own menus — with the screen rendered from the compiled parameter data and an inspector that links everything to procedures and manual sections.

Digitakt II: full device support

The fourth and final device of the current lineup: the Digitakt II (OS 1.15A) joins with its complete interactive manual — 124 manual sections, 252 parameters, 82 procedures with zh/ja translations, panel demos, and Web MIDI control.

Machine pages in MIDI control for Syntakt & Digitone II

The MIDI control grid can now reach the synth-machine parameter pages on the Syntakt and Digitone II — previously only the Tonverk's machines were selectable.

Mobile polish

Tidy up the header on phones and move the language picker into a compact menu.

Digitone II depth

Round out the Digitone II: arpeggiator / voice / setup parameters, LFO modulation destinations in the tutor, and Chinese / Japanese Get Started pages.

Elektron Digitone II added

Add the Elektron Digitone II (OS 1.10D) as a third device — its full interactive manual, FM-aware MIDI engine, and trilingual procedures, selectable from the device picker.

Feedback

Add a feedback form so you can report a manual error, a bug, or a suggestion from any page.

Syntakt app polish

Activate the Syntakt translations that shipped in 0.4.0, make the AI tutor speak per-device, and add visitor analytics.

Elektron Syntakt added

Add the Elektron Syntakt (OS 1.40A) as a second device — its full interactive manual, MIDI engine, and trilingual procedures, selectable from the device picker.

Multi-device architecture

Restructure the app around devices so more Elektron manuals can be added. Tonverk content is unchanged, now served under a device path.

Project process & meta pages

Set up release tracking and project-level pages, ahead of multi-device support.

Tonverk Interactive Manual — initial release

First public release: a complete interactive rebuild of the Elektron Tonverk user manual (OS 1.3.3).