They released a patch a few months ago, and you can do all kinds of time signatures now. In fact, at the last Up Your Cherry show, I even programmed out a whole song that's mostly in 7/4, but has a couple of measures of 4/4 (and no, it doesn't sound anything like March of the Pigs). The complaints lately have been that the MIDI implementation isn't great. It is kind of embarrassing that a drum machine with the name of the guy who invented MIDI on it has so many quirks. The main developer (who is very easy to talk to via the DSI forums or via Gearslutz) has said that the next revision involves rewriting the MIDI code from scratch. That's pretty severe. The USB jack didn't do anything for the first six months I had it, and updating the firmware via SYSEX was a slow and delicate task. Now that MIDI USB is working, that's no longer an issue.

The Tempest is the only drum machine I've ever preferred programming live vs. step programming. Writing beats on it comes quite effortlessly. It is not an Electribe, it's a complicated synthesizer, and although it's easy to work with all the parameters, synthesizing drums that don't suck takes time & practice - and the presets kinda blow. (Except the Little Red Corvette pattern, which is superfluously great) That said, there have been some really great 'how-to' posts on the DSI forums for all kinds of different ideas, and apparently a whole new preset pack is coming out with some upcoming OS update.

Go sign up to http://dsiforum.org/viewforum.php?f=24 and have a look around (the user named Pym is the main programmer for the Tempest OS), but keep in mind that's like going to ETS - you'll see a lot of people complaining loudly about something they really really like, in amongst the more standard synth forum stuff. And I can't say I blame them - the Tempest was sold as an unfinished product. I've owned it for over a year, and it's still not quite there... however, the 'todo' list doesn't have anything to do with what I use mine for, so, whatever.

The nice thing about that is you can land a used one and save hundreds of dollars. I kind of regret having pre-ordered, just because I paid the early adopter tax, but in the same breath, it's pretty much exactly the kind of machine I've always wanted, and so I did some extra work on the side and put in an early order to support the very existence of such a device. If it came out of the door with everything it said it had, I think it would be a classic on the level of the Minimoog or the 808 or other such legendary devices (Which, importantly, hold their value). The error-prone year of beta OS releases has dampened the party somewhat. Take advantage of that