At the risk of harming my reputation by releasing buggy stuff, I’ll share my ‘work in progress’ in implementing the ‘auto-stop recording’ feature here if you are brave enough to try 
.
The new feature is implemented as follows:
- On a blank new ‘song’ record track 1 of any length, as before.
- Then you can press button ‘H’ (originally ‘playback loop on/off’) to access the new function. Press the button to select the number of multiples of track 1’s length you want to record for the ‘follower’ loops. The track status lights will light up dark blue momentarily to show your selection. e.g. 1 light will mean when you record a follower loop it will start/stop automatically quantized to the length of track 1’s recording. 2 blue lights will mean it will start/stop automatically quantized to twice the length of track 1’s recording. 3 and 4 lights let you record loops pre-set to 3x and 4x.
- If you select 5 lights with button ‘H’ then you get the original behaviour again (the default) where you have to stop the recording manually.
- Note that if you selected multiples of 2, 3, or 4, the recording start-time will be a quantized multiple of 2/3/4 track 1 loop-lengths from when you started playing. i.e. It may take one or more full repeats of track 1 before it starts recording. This is to keep everything lined up.
- The ‘threshold start’ works as usual if you arm a track when things are not playing, and the auto-stop feature will still work according to the setting.
- Now when you start recording a loop on the follower track, it will automatically stop recording after the length of time set by button ‘h’.
Known bugs -
If you have ‘setting 5’ (i.e. unlimited length recording) it may start playing back mid-loop right after you stop recording, rather than starting from the beginning. If you stop then start playback of the song, then it should line up ok.
If you try recording on a follower track without recording something first on track 1, things will get messed up and there may be a loud sound or a glitch.
! Very Important ! Please read…
If you have been using a previous version of this “m5 hack” patch, installing this update by copying the pd folder in this project to the root of your SDCard at /pd will overwrite your existing recordings (since the m5 hack patch stores recordings at /pd/songs). Make sure to back up your recordings for installing the new version. (e.g. simply rename the existing /pd folder on the SD Card something else, e.g. /pd-previous before installing this update. )
5moons-m5-wip-2026-27.zip (207.6 KB)