Tallfree

Speech is produced on the SP itself by OpenEVV, a reimplementation of IBM's Embedded ViaVoice, and plays through the main outputs over whatever the unit is playing; it is not recorded when you sample or resample. Reading covers screen titles, the selected menu item, changed values, effect names, on and off states of GATE, LOOP, REVERSE, BPM SYNC and EXT SOURCE, file and folder names and the step each pad sets in TR-REC. Speed, pitch, voice, volume, abbreviations and screen reading are set from a menu opened with SHIFT and EXIT. The firmware changes 13 bytes of Roland's 5.52 image and adds a small boot loader; to make room for the engine the looper and skip-back buffer is halved, from 27.3 to 13.65 seconds per channel. The speech engine is a separate file that copies itself into internal memory after the first boot.

Format an SD card of up to 32 GB as FAT32, unzip a release onto it, hold SHIFT while switching on and press the VALUE knob, then delete the two .bin files from the card after the update. Installing Roland's own system program the same way restores stock. If the unit will not start after an engine update, an empty file named NOENGINE in the TALLFREE folder starts it without the engine.