I’m seriously interested in Sensory Percussion, mainly for its sensitivity and expressive tracking: ghost notes, very soft dynamics, buzz rolls, positional nuance, and playing on quiet heads such as the dB Zero. The acoustic-shell component is less important to me than preserving the fine detail of an actual drum performance.
Before buying, I’d appreciate some clarification on a few things that are decisive for my setup:
Native Linux support: Is Linux support planned for Sensory Percussion and the Portal? My primary music system runs Linux, so relying permanently on Windows or macOS would be a significant limitation.
96 kHz and ADAT: Can the Portal and Sensory Percussion operate natively at 96 kHz? More specifically, does the Portal’s ADAT output support 96 kHz via S/MUX, and if so, how many channels are available?
Portal alongside a primary interface: I use an RME RayDAT as my main interface and don’t want to replace it or create an aggregate device. Ideally, the Portal would handle sensor input and Sensory Percussion processing while the RayDAT remained the main DAW and system interface, with SP audio sent digitally to it over ADAT. Is that workflow officially supported—or technically straightforward—without driver conflicts, awkward device aggregation, or unnecessary routing latency? You can see in this forum post that using multiple interfaces is already a concern.
Very quiet playing and brushes: Is continued strong support for ultra-quiet heads such as the dB Zero part of the product direction, particularly without sacrificing ghost-note and positional sensitivity? I’d also love to see a clear demonstration of brush performance—not only discrete brush taps, but buzzes and continuous sweeps across the head.
Sensory Percussion looks unusually close to what I want from electronic percussion: retaining the continuous nuance of drumming instead of reducing it to basic trigger events. If these areas are supported—or firmly on the roadmap—it would make the buying decision much easier for me.
Hi @hexspa - welcome to the sunhouse forum! Here are some answers to your questions:
1) Linux support: This is not on our roadmap at the moment. The issue is not technical, we could get a Linux build done pretty quickly. The main issue is testing and support. None of our team use Linux as a daily driver, so it wouldn’t be insignificant to test each build and provide support for Linux. I’m not ruling it out for the future, though. If we get many more requests for Linux support, we can reconsider it, but I think this is maybe only the second request for linux in the last year.
2) 96 kHz and ADAT: Unfortunately, this is not possible. It’s a hardware limitation with the Portal.
3) Portal alongside primary interface: This feature is being tested in the 2.8 beta now.
4) Brushes. The SP sensors and software are extremely sensitive. So no issue with quiet playing or ghost notes. That’s not going away. We don’t support brush sweeps, though. The system registers “hits”. You can strike the drum with brushes and that works fine, though. Could be something we add in the future, but it’s not currently on our short or medium-term roadmap.
Thanks for the quick and clear reply—that answers the major questions I had.
Given the current situation, it sounds like the cleanest setup for me would be to run Sensory Percussion on a separate supported laptop and feed analog audio from Portal into my existing 96 kHz recording system.
Also, if Linux support ever does become something you want to explore, I’d be happy to help test a build on LMDE 7. I’m still refining that system myself, but I’d be glad to provide structured testing and bug reports if that becomes useful.
EDIT: My initial post says that Linux is my primary recording OS. It is not, it’s Windows 11, but I’m indeed working toward it.
I’ll put it out there that I’m seconding that I would very much appreciate native Linux support. Currently the lack of support goes both ways, Sensory Percussion is too niche and too new so nobody in the Linux community has figured out a compatibility layer workaround for it yet. As a result SP is the singular thing making me consider dual booting again for the first time in 10 years.