Troubleshooting
When something looks wrong
Nearly everything on this page is a switch, a card, a key or a setting. Find the symptom, read the one answer under it, and get back to playing.
Your sounds are safe.
Nothing on this page erases your library. Saved slots live on the card, settings live on the device, and the one deliberate factory reset leaves your /glide folder alone. Read on without worrying. New to the instrument? The playing guide is the place to start, and every key and setting is on the reference page.
I plugged it in and nothing happened.
The side switch was off. Slide it to ON and plug in again. That's nearly always all it is.
On battery it shows the Launcher logo, then restarts, over and over.
A completely flat battery, not a broken unit. Switch ON, plug in, choose Launcher's charge mode (press a key at the start screen → CFG → charge mode), and give it a full hour. An empty cell charges slowly at first and can read full while plugged in. Trust the hour, not the number.
The screen went dark on its own.
Idle dimming, then the screensaver. Any key wakes it and plays the note. Settings → Screen idle turns it off if you'd rather.
I want Launcher, not GLIDE.
Press the left trigger on the top edge, marked BTN RST, then tap any key as the device comes up. Holding ` inside GLIDE only restarts GLIDE. The right trigger is GLIDE's own macro and never restarts anything.
How much battery is left?
The perform screen warns below 25% and blinks red at 10%. Settings shows the exact percentage.
Nothing comes out.
In order: bksp for panic, which silences and resets every layer. opt to raise the volume (ctrl lowers it). Check nothing is in the headphone jack if you expect the speaker. If fn+q brings GLIDE back, the sound you were on was rolled or edited silent; Undo in settings walks back to what you had.
The sound changes by itself when I move.
Tilt is on. Tap enter to turn it off, or settings → Tilt center to teach it where your flat is. If it changes when you touch the top edge, the right trigger is set to latch: press it once more, or settings → Trigger mode.
Every note sounds flat, or never quite lands.
The glide time is long. fn+1 grabs it; with fn still held, - shortens it. A rolled sound is capped so it always lands, but a hand-turned one isn't.
Everything is suddenly in a different key.
You tapped fn+k (key up) or fn+s (next scale), or LISTEN retuned to a song. The top of the screen names the current key and scale. fn+shift+k walks the key back down; settings → Root key and Scale set them outright.
There's a * next to the sound's name.
The live sound has unsaved edits. fn+shift+its letter keeps them; loading any slot with fn+letter drops them.
A slot doesn't sound like it used to.
You shift-saved over it at some point. Settings → LIBRARY → Sound reset puts the factory sound back in that slot; Reset all sounds restores the whole bank with your o and p intact.
Notes cut off when I play more than a few.
The voice cap. fn+8 raises it (up to eight). Drones, the loop and the progression never count against it.
A chord keeps playing under me.
That's the jam row: the bottom row latches drones and spells progressions. bksp clears it. If you'd rather have a plain grid, settings → Jam rows off.
The backing is stuck on an old sound or octave.
Working as designed: change sound or octave over a running jam and only the solo moves, marked by an amber LK. bksp clears the jam and drops the split.
The strip over the scope says ARP and the chords are broken into notes.
The arpeggiator is on. fn+a cycles up, down, up/down, off (fn+shift+a goes straight back). It's always off after a restart, so you can never be trapped in it.
A loop won't go away.
Hold alt for about a second to clear it. A tap only records, closes or overdubs. fn+alt peels one layer at a time.
Something is clicking in time.
The metronome. fn+\ turns it off; fn+ctrl turns it down. It always starts quiet on boot and never records into the loop.
Every key is a semitone apart now.
You're holding shift. Let go. Chromatic is momentary on purpose.
A banner along the bottom keeps asking me to do things.
The tour. It's sixty seconds and moves on when your fingers do the gesture; ` skips it. A unit that just updated asks once, with a card: enter starts, any other key passes. Settings → Tutorial replays it whenever you want.
It says "no SD card" when I try to save.
Saved slots and the library live on the card, so saving needs one. Everything about making sound is card-free. Insert a card and the save goes through; pop a card back in and your slots return mid-session, no reboot.
My saved slots vanished.
Almost always a different card, or no card. Your slots are files in /glide/slots/ on the card you saved them with. Put that card back.
Load from SD doesn't show a file I copied over.
It looks in a glide folder at the root of the card. Make sure the file is in there, ends in .gpat, and that the card was ejected properly from the computer before you pulled it.
Loading a sound then saving it made a second file.
The file's name and the patch name inside it disagree, so Save to SD named the new file after the sound. Keep them equal and load-then-save is a no-op. The library page ships every file already matched.
The computer wants to "repair" or "format" the card.
Decline. That erases your library. Try another reader, adapter or port first; it's nearly always the reader.
It says NO SIGNAL.
The room was too quiet, or the song too far away. Nothing changed. Hold fn+k again closer to the speaker.
It says "mic unavailable".
LISTEN needs the Cardputer ADV's microphone. On the original Cardputer it's a visible message, never a broken instrument; fn+k and fn+s still set the key and scale by hand.
It landed close, but not quite.
Tap space while the result card is up to cycle the other likely readings: the sibling mode, the safe pentatonic, the relative twin. Each is applied live as you cycle. enter keeps what's showing; fn+k again re-listens.
It changed my tempo too.
When the song has a confident beat, LISTEN sets the jam clock to it, and the synced delay and LFOs follow. Tap your own tempo back in on \, or set Jam tempo in settings.
The full walkthrough is the updating guide. These are the four places people land.
GLIDE starts before I can press a key.
Press BTN RST (the left trigger) and start tapping a key straight away, before the logo finishes. There's about a second.
The version on the splash didn't change.
The old copy is still installed. Launcher adds apps rather than replacing them, so delete the installed GLIDE first, then install the new one from SD → apps.
I've got two GLIDE tiles now.
Same cause. Delete both, install once. Your sounds don't care; they aren't in the app.
I deleted GLIDE and now there's nothing to play.
That's the halfway point, not a disaster. Browse the card in Launcher to apps and install GLIDE.bin. Everything you saved is waiting.
It flashed STORAGE FIXED in green at boot.
Another app filled the flash the Cardputer shares between apps; GLIDE cleaned it out and restored your settings and live sound from its own mirror on the card. Nothing to do. Settings → SYSTEM → Storage just reads OK.
I want the settings back to factory, but keep my sounds.
Settings → SYSTEM → Reset defaults. Saved sounds are untouched.
I want a completely fresh device.
Press and hold bksp during the boot splash and keep it held through the red confirm bar, about a second and a half. Releasing at any point cancels. Settings and the ten slots go back to factory (their card files too, so the reset means what it says). Your /glide library, your two generative slots' identity and the odometer all survive it. The press has to start during the splash; a key held from power-on can't be seen.
Still stuck
Ask the person who wrote it
The Discord is fastest, and other players are there too. Or use the contact form and pick Firmware or repair as the subject. Say what you saw on the screen and which build the splash shows; that's usually enough.