As I understand it, transferring data as audio goes back quite ways, right?

I had a Commodore 64 that could use phillips tape. I'm drawing. blank, but IIRC there were musical instruments (maybe the roland juno 60?) in the 80s that were storing their data as audio, too.

Unfortunately I think only a few of the PO's support this transfer method, and I don't think the 33 is one of them. They were never meant to be updated at all, as I understand it.

Me too, have been trying to crack this for so long!

The synth engine is an implementation of https://soniccharge.com/microtonic Not sure what "accurate" means in your context though?

This was released in 2017 for one thing. Considering that enough people are still interested in it a decade later they probably did something right.

Pretentious hipster shit is their whole brand.

Sure, but being able to share the 'data dump' at the end of a Youtube Video is so much more fun/likely to be used.

https://youtu.be/TLzAyouLQxw?si=mm6goX-cMyEZkwOI&t=102

It's sending sound parameter information (e.g. filter cutoff at 12khz, resonance at 1.6, Q of 0.89) along with note information (e.g. start playing note A4 with velocity 80). You could absolutely use a MIDI CC channel to convey this information. The OP-32 chooses a different route and encodes this into an audio signal so that it can transmit it over the air using the speaker/mic instead of a wireless stack.

I bet it sounds like a dial-up tone!

> Wait, isn't this what MIDI is for?

It is but I don’t think this Pocket Operator has MIDI without adding third party hardware.

All it means is that the PO-32 is not a sampler, it's a synthesizer, so it receives a "preset" for the synth rather than an audio sample.

Would have been easier to say it receives patches - I think most people would get this.