Analogue-sequencer

> HI I also prefer pots as opposed to rotary encoders..

> Also on alot of the synths I have had with rotary 
> encoders they seem to crap out fast and have problems..

The rotary encoders I'm using have similar lifetime ratings to the pots.
I suspect a lot of problems with flaky encoders are caused by poor software
implementation.
Bouncing encoder switches should not cause mis-read increments if you are
tracking the preceding states of the encoder outputs, and ignoring any
invalid transitions.

There are still two pots on Cirklon. You will be able to edit step values
with those, either by sculpting or the usual touch-edit on the selected step
(or ganged steps).
Plus you'll be able to assign external controllers to edit functions.
I can fairly easily do a P3 build to send 'remote edit' messages to a
Cirklon from the P3's knobs and switches.

I find encoders much better for note selection. I would often adjust a note
knob on P3, causing it to jump to a radically different value, and I'd
immediately forget what the note had been beforehand.
With an encoder, if you move it one step and change your mind, you just have
to move it one step back.
Also, their relative operation makes ganging of steps possible in a way that
it isn't really practical with pots.
For example, on Cirklon, if you want to transpose every step in a bar up by
an octave, you press GANG twice to enable gang-all, then press shift and
turn any encoder one step up or down. That moves every step up or down on
octave.
Sure, you can have pots do pass-through, or scaled ranges, but that is a lot
less intuitive than one click=one increment in either direction.

I agree that pots are preferable for synth editing, where each control has a
known range, and you can tell just by where you need to move any knob to to
get to roughly the right place.
But with knobs that control values with such varying ranges, as well as
performing selections from variable length lists of patterns etc., I think
encoders win.

Best regards,
Colin Fraser
Sequentix Music Systems Ltd
http://www.sequentix.com