So the Button Expander has 8 black buttons (not white like the prototype we had in 2024). And they’re physically momentary buttons (same ones as on the Catalyst if you know that module). You can choose to map each button as latching, so you can have a button control an on/off type switch or button (press once to turn on, press again to turn off). Or you can use them as momentary.
You also can daisy chain the modules, the limit is 4.
It’s 6HP.
1 Like
oh, Id hoped the buttons were white ‘transparent’ with led behind,
so that they could have a lit/unlit state.
this would have been very useful to represent various states.
e.g. steps on a sequencer, or run/stop state, pulsing bpm for tap tempo
etc etc.
1 Like
Yeah, originally we had white LED buttons because it seems like a good idea… but a couple issues made it spiral in complexity:
- Many lights don’t have an obvious 1:1 associated button (at least not obvious to the computer)
- Lots of lights have more than one color. E.g. Red = stop, green = playing would not translate to a button
The best solution is to have a separate “light mapper”, but that added another level of complexity in the firmware that would stall the project at least a couple months more.
So we decided to go with lower cost, and basic functionality.
And, we sourced some RGB buttons that we’re playing with, so we might end up making an RGB version, but no promises!
The news just came out. 125 dollars, no led, October 6th, 2025. What do you think?
A bit too expensive just for eight buttons… but quite a lot of things under the hoods, I guess.
2 Likes
I didnt think I’d ever need 8 buttons, so I bought a Ladik U-075 Dual arcade manual gate for about 50 bucks.
I said this a while ago but I’d love an expander with a few inputs, a few knobs, and two buttons. I don’t think I’ll have a use for eight buttons but it’d be great to have two.
4 Likes
+1 on that suggestion. I’d love in the future to have TRS MIDI in/out jacks, but I probably don’t have any use for 6X gate in/6x gate out jacks and a I2C jack (per the prototype module shown to date) just to obtain TRS MIDI.
I really wish the Meta shipped with at least 2 mappable buttons on the panel, but this expander with 8 buttons is too many imo. I definitely would have preferred an expander with 4 knobs and 4 buttons instead.
I’m surprised to hear that people don’t imagine using 8 buttons. A few potential uses for 8 buttons: muting/unmuting individual channels in a larger mix (super useful for techno and/or live performances), manual triggers for different drums, tap tempo for QCD or DLD, lots of opportunities to map others to toggle mode settings on Mutable Instruments modules, 4ms modules, or hundreds of other virtual modules in MetaModule…
Some users will want more than 8, and MetaButtons can be daisy-chained.
Triggering one-shots on a sampler module - I will easily use all 8!!
i could also imagine the 8 buttons being assigned to trigger notes in a scale, so the expander could act as a mini keyboard of some kind. or 6 buttons assigned to notes (or samples), and the remaining 2 buttons for triggering random cvs on the samplers or bog fm-op (or plaits) so you get different timbres that way.
you could also do some logic with buttons 1 and 2: press button 1 and it switches all the samples that buttons 3-8 trigger. press button 2 and 3-8 trigger a different bank of samples.
3 Likes