I am also in this niche
I think my selling points are pretty much the same as yours. Additionally, I thought that since there’s significant open source software involved, I should still be able to use and even develop “content” for the device independently of the health of the company.
There isn’t. It is an exposition of a business issue related to the fact that our software is OS.
I am happy to hear that multiple users made their decision of moving into our platform influenced by MODEP. I would love to understand if that happens at scale level or if this is just a handful of isolated cases. Also it would be great to discover how many people have not joined MOD and decided to go the low-cost path.
On a personal POV, I share the opinion of the majority here. I think that there are multiple reasons to being OS, from philosophical to practical ones, and, as I wrote in the initial post, I am neither attacking OS nor willing to go proprietary.
But on the business level, there are issues related to being OS that, in more than one occasion, worked against our growth as a business.
On the long run, I share the opinion of many here, that the hardware and services are the means to make the revenue and the software should be distributed.
In our long-term vision, the company would migrate from a hardware based revenue model (which is what we have today) to online services and marketplace in the future. In a further scenario, when we are big enough, the price of the hardware should even be “subsidised” by the other revenues so to diminish even more the barrier to entry of new customers.
But that is the thing. All these ideas only work at scale level.
In order to have the required revenue size coming mostly from software and services, the population needs to reach a critical mass.
We are still stuck on the growth to get there, so still no practical solution for us here.
Sorry guys. Woke up sadder than normally today 
For my side, MODEP served as a way to validate the MOD Dwarf: enough to understand how MOD UI works, but also enough to understand MODEP itself is not enough. It may be a stop-gap, but in the end, somebody that tries MODEP and wants to get involved has (had?) not really other places than moddevices.com to try to find answers, tricks, explanations, and then be exposed to the real thing. So, it is good as an enabler. Somehow, it helps that MODEP is not really making any big effort to keep at the forefront. It’s more “here! we enabled this for you, do what you want/can”.
As I mentioned above, I believe the extra services (plugin store, pedalboard sharing) are really adding value to the platform, and the Dwarf is the “key” to access them. Paid services (e.g. paid plugins) are also fine - to a certain extent: when I buy a device, I wouldn’t want to feel my device is sub-par unless I invest much more. Also, I wouldn’t like to feel that I have “rented” my device (which is often the case when the hardware is subsidised), that if I stop paying, then my device is somehow “disabled” (for some functionality). In summary, I wouldn’t want to feel a hostage of a subscription model. Not all subscription models are bad though, subscriptions that are giving access to additional services are good. A subscription to pay to have access to e.g. a certain “sound” and that you lose if you don’t pay are bad (e.g as would be renting plugins or features of the device itself). By this, I just want to say that MOD Devices has hit a sweet point with the Dwarf (many plugins available from the start, yet options for some advanced paid-for plugins, and no renting model), and it just needs to find a way to keep it viable on the long term.
Actually, I think that, in these times where everything costs more, a well-polished hardware which caters to all your needs is actually more valuable than ever. And its value should not appear less than it is. Given the cost of individual pedals, if I invest in a Dwarf expecting to replace most pedals (if not all, in certain setups), then I would not expect the hardware to cost peanuts. It’s just that the experience of using a Dwarf should be top-notch from the moment I take it out of the box 
(which comes back to the fact that “cheap” alternatives won’t be on par).
My path was built a MODEP, built a zynthian (still use it as a zynthian), invested in the Dwarf.
Can’t you turn this open source “weakness” around? From I have 2000 hardware/software clients limited by some cheaper solutions to I have 2000 hardware clients and 5000 software clients all “selling” how good the platform is, the entry to be a software client is (was) a 35$ raspberry and we have the nicer hardware by far.
You can setup a survey for this, I really don’t know the size.
Best,
THIS!!!
Let’s be clear : that was totally reasonable in a context where NOBODY could foresee the collapse of the supply chain for electronics from China. If one had told an investor in early 2019 that they wouldn’t want to develop a product based on electronic components made in Asia, they would have been shout at and treated like fools.
There are already plenty of proprietary solutions on the market. Adding one more to the list wouldn’t be a win in my opinion. They are backed by much more wealthy investors and armed with tons of marketing experts. Think of the Spark by positive Grid. So if it was just to have that, I don’t think a lot of us would have been attracted by MOD’s product. What makes it unique is the Open Source model.
I discovered MOD while thinking about creating my own DIY pedal running open source simulators like Guitarix or Rakarrack. I didn’t want to spend loads of money buying pedals that can only do one thing, plus an Amp that can only do one thing, or even a Line 6 simulator which is locked to do only a couple of things. At the time I believe they were starting to sell small pedals running software based effects, but you could only run one effect at a time on one pedal and it was all closed and black-box like. I didn’t want to be trapped in that. I always hated Apple products because of that, when you are totally dependant of arbitrary decisions from the manufacturer.
I was also worried about what would happen to my product if the company goes bust. With Hardware pedals, you don’t care, because you can still fix them if they fail. But with software based devices, you need updates, bug fixes, and ideally to be able to add your own effects, or effects that come from a different provider.
So I was dreaming about what it would take for me to hack together such a dream device, and by looking up some similar projects (so that I did not have to reinvent the wheel), I came across the MOD first kickstarter. And I immediately wanted to get a Duo. It was doing exactly what I wanted and probably way better than anything I could achieve myself. And I could even get involved if I wanted to.
I wouldn’t have jumped onboard for anything else.
The next best alternative to me is not MODEP but simply running the MOD interface on a strong enough laptop with a good soundcard and a bunch of MIDI controllers. Even in live settings. Because the laptop offers power and maximum possibilities, including editing the board live. Many acts have laptops on stage as well. But still in that case, the MOD interface is really bringing a lot to the table. Because of the model based on jack and the endless possibility of routing it offers. I actually think the MOD interface is a way better UI than all the Jack traditionnal UIs, like Qjackctl or Catia, and it makes a lot of sense running it on a PC.
What would be awesome is to be able to run ANY commercial plugin in the MOD system. I guess it wouldn’t be possible on an ARM based mod devices for performance reasons, but maybe embedding a CPU emulator able to run VSTs created on a different platform inside a MOD plugin would be a game changer (at least on the PC version). Is that just a dream @falkTX ?
not for any foreseeable future, I would say minimum 5 years.
emulating x64 on ARM is something not even microsoft is able to do properly yet.
apple only did because they “cheated” by adjusting their own hardware and chips to make that actually feasible.
and ARM cpus general performance is still not that great. this at least is where things can quickly improve. in my opinion the best path for the industry as a whole would be to leave x86/64 architecture behind, would love to see a generic all-purpose ARM chip that matches M1 performance…
I mean “how do they get paid for their work” in general. Not especially by MOD. What is the business model of Guitarix. Is that 100% unpaid voluntary work ?
Indeed : it might be good to have a page on the site talking about MODEP etc… explaining what they are (encouraging enthusiats DIYers to check them out) and how you are VERY different from them. That would clarify your relationship with them in the eyes of potential investors.
Actually, it could be a good idea to present these projets (including the MOD PC version, and the online MODs) like unique possibility of testing before you buy! Like great tasters or cheaper versions that people can try, and then move on to the MOD once they want the real deal (the rugged undestructible powerful PRO version).
To be realistic I think even on the bare software side original Mod is more advanced. This is because features on mod-host/mod-ui are mostly ad hoc for Mod product. On the plugin side, I think both my yocto porting of mod-plugin-builder and also the debian packages of MODEP are not up to date with mod-plugin-builder. In my case I simply don’t have the time to stay behind developement on this repo in particular. I remember I’ve checked out some time ago the plugins in MODEP debian packages and they were at least a year old comparing with Mod devel. For example at the time MODEP didn’t offer file browser feature. This is a way to say that derivative projects are not all that danger at all, in an open source project things like that exist, are part of the game and moreover the bigger the community, the better. More chance a musician will enter a studio and find a Mod device or derivative and ask: hey what’s that?
On a different performance aspect : wouldn’t it be worth exploring the opportunities offered by GPUs as well. How do GPU calculations integrate with the JACK engine ?
I can ask since this pretty much overlap with neural network inference in audio plugins. Like I’ve already said my plugin is based on RTNeural lib from @chowdsp. In his paper, which I’ve studied, there is a mention on why not using GPUs or NAs (Neural Accellerators) when doing inference for real time audio. Well the problem, in this exact moment, is that access time to external hardware is too much for real time audio applications. The benefits in terms of computations are killed by the time it takes for the plugin to transfer the data to external hardware block plus initializing/configuring it. Let’s keep a look maybe in future it will be feasible.
Here we are talking about x86_64 emulators on ARM. Isn’t there a way to translate x86_64 assembly code to ARM assembly beforehand. Like a sort of recompiling from the compiled code ? Or is that a silly idea ?
When you’re talking about Microsoft you are thinking of this ?
Story and Ideas sound so familiar… hah! love to see “my thoughts” already written. Happens so often in this forum! love it.
** Opinions expressed here are my own for the sake of discussion and not those of the company **
I believe that making the store available on the other platforms could turn this use of MOD’s hard work that works against MOD into something that works for MOD.
Having user accounts and a central MOD store that is used by MOD users, Zynthian users, MODEP users and others to all feed benefits back to MOD.
If investors are afraid of that, then I think they haven’t understood the message or the messaging hasn’t been tailored to see the advantages of the situation.
I keep thinking of the Android analogy. Android is open source but it benefits Google greatly. Everyone using Android has a Google account and they buy apps from Google no matter who they buy their hardware from. Google gets all of the user’s data and some of their money. People buying cheap shitty Android phones doesn’t stop them from appreciating Android, most grow to like it and are encouraged to try the experience on a better phone, much like how many users here first tried MODEP or Zynthian before committing to “the real deal” buying a MOD device. Having Android available to hundreds of cheap smartphone brands has not stopped the Google Pixel’s success. It is now in the top 3 most popular smartphones. Also, when people decide to buy a Galaxy instead, Google benefits greatly still.
The point I’m trying to make is something like “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. I can appreciate that the investors see it as a problem, but I believe they are viewing it from the wrong angle and maybe MOD is too. I believe the situation can be taken advantage of to establish MOD as the biggest fish in the pond (which in a way it already is in this specific domain), the market leader that the competitors and competitor’s customers rely on and I think this is the messaging that needs to be communicated to investors
It could be that access to the MOD repos for non-MOD devices owners requires a small sub. That would bring a bit of cashflow in.
For instance, the PC version of the MOD ui has a lot of Tuna cans skins. If I could source the plugins from the store with the full nice skins. Including non-free ones and beta etc… I would be a happy man.
If the UI was also available as a plugin for proprietary DAWs, it would be even better. Imagine having a MOD plugin inside Logic, and people being able to source the MOD plugins from the MOD store !!!
that would multiply MOD’s sources of income and exposure for MOD hardware products as well. If you can have the same pedalboard that you use for production in your DAW as the ones you are using on stage, it’s a super nice win-win situation ! How hard would that be to implement @gianfranco @falkTX ?
If this is for Mod’s proprietary plugins then it’s a great idea. Maybe with a licensing system that is not a total crap like iLok.
although I understand very well why some modgui graphics are not “free” and why they’re kept in a separate repo, from the devel/maintainance point of view this is a total nightmare. Plus why the plugins should not look awesome on every platform? So that the quality of the project is perceived without situations like: hey, this looks crappy, I won’t spend my money in the expensive unit if it looks like this. Because it’s not trivial to understand actually a plugin and its gui are separated in this project, this is not something you can translate to VST world for example. And imho is a LOT confusing.
Since I know gui design has costs, why not including them in a dedicated campaign? With contributors from every platform (an even bigger community).
I know this is hard, just I hope that this problem will be addressed one day. Web gui should be part of plugin’s source code and possibly maintained by plugin developers. This is difficult now since officially this thing is only a Mod thing. But what if this becames a bigger thing?
Just thinking…
What would be awesome is a simplified/unified plugin development toolkit, with a nice interface, that allows do easily create the GUI skins, and to focus on the DSP algorithm. I really would have liked to contribute to some plugins if the dev process didn’t look so daunting.