Unofficial firmware gets Elektron’s Outbox 8 talking to the Octatrack
Developer Stephen McLeod’s mod makes the Octatrack work with a box Elektron doesn’t support it with, and it was largely coded with Claude.
Stephen McLeod has got Elektron’s new Outbox 8 working with the Octatrack, a pairing Elektron doesn’t support. The synthesist and developer showed it in a video running on his own unofficial firmware mod.
If your Octatrack is the brain of your rig, that matters. It means the sequencer you already own may be able to drive new hardware without waiting for Elektron to add support, which it hasn’t.
How McLeod built it is the other story. The mod is “vibe coded” with Claude, part of a sudden wave of firmware mods and audio plugins made possible by LLM coding tools. That wave is raising concerns, and it is also feeding a growing scene of alternative firmware that adds features to gear people already have.
It’s a demo video, so treat it like one. Flashing unofficial firmware onto the box that runs your live set is a risk you should weigh yourself, especially when much of the code was generated by an AI tool. If you’re a producer who uses the Octatrack as a studio sequencer, it’s easier to experiment.
