I realize that there is a price tag attached, that said a Pete Thorn review might have provided a value ROI that would have been justified. It wouldn’t be the first time my pedal purchases were influenced by a demo that he did. His Soundblox Pro Multiwave Distortion demo from a decade ago made me aware of Source Audio, and I have became a fan boy owning six of their pedals -including the original Multiwave.
We should propagate the Discord server, as it is a completely independent channel free of risk of going down.
Join if you have Discord!
Meanwhile, brainstorming about making an alternative source for plugins is being done here:
If we get an independent platform up and running with
- seperate FREE plugins (since there are some things to be figured out what to do with paid plugins)
- firmware updates
- docu on which plugin is what and does what etc
- documentation how to manually install plugins in the most foolproof and noob friendly way possible
Do we need to find a sponsor to set up a CMS or could this be achieved otherwise?
Please look at it from the UX perspective: If we can have the users skip compiling stuff from github that woudl be great. I’m thinking of a way to see info about the plugin, download and a step-by-step manual to install them.
I’d gladly help with creating/beautifying/ foolproofifying content
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Excellent idea!
I’ve saying that a lot - “Excellent idea!” “Great idea!”… And not really offering to contribute. My skills were fairly limited to begin with. I’ve played guitar for +/- 60 years and with bands at the “weekend warrior” level off and on since '71 and I was an IT professional in various capacities from IBM mainframe to PC/unix/linux, LAN/WAN, etc. Never very high level at anything and quite a breadth of knowledge and expertise with not very much depth in anything.
Given all my other obligations I’m only able to offer any kind of direct support on a very limited basis. What limited applicable skills I might have seem to be covered by considerable expertise by forum participants.
I’ve just signed in (already have an account) to the discord page and I see that it’s an “unclaimed account”.
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Guys, it breaks my hear to hear that you are having such trouble. This product is good, the philosophy is sound, and I think you have the attention of any musician in the Open Source community (and then some). Don’t forget us. We won’t be forgetting you. Come back to us when things are a little better. Stay true to the vision.
Best Wishes.
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I do hope you’re able to get the plugin site and even the store back up — I was meaning to drop a little cash on RMPro and a couple of other things, and I’d be quite happy to still do that — it’s not like the hardware is going anywhere. I’m quite hopeful that even if the reboot doesn’t fully work out, we’ll be able to keep the devices patched and sort out some basic bugfixes as an open source project. Best of luck handling what has to have been a massively rough ride.
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Hi folks, I’ve seen a lot of talk on here about a DIY option. This does exist already, it’s called pi-Stomp! and it’s awesome. If you wanna check it out, here’s the link: https://www.treefallsound.com/
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What about GUI? Does it works?
The web interface works, though it’s the open source version, so no plugin store or pedalboard sharing
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Does it really work with 5V ? Because it could mean that you can power it with a USB powerbank if you have a “USB to DC” cable. That would make this pedal usable for busking.
Wait could this work with the dwarf?!?
Yes, it does. I’ve actually powered it with a pd type powerbank.
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Meaning?
So, here we have philosophical thing … With IP, we have a concept of possession. Yet, with open source, how is it that anyone can have (possess) the code, but not own it? In every real sense, if it’s in their possession, they own it. Right?
Only in civil law do things like copyright, patents, title, holdership, etc. have any meaning. Otherwise, it’s a legalistic fiction, which we can choose to believe in, or not.
Then comes along Copyleft, in the spirit of RMS and GNU. Here, in essence, we have a legal mechanism which uses copyright to ensure, effectively, that NOBODY owns a piece of software … This is perhaps another farce, but it makes a lot more practical sense if you ask me.
Nonetheless, we have the term Intellectual Property and try to apply it to open source. Of course, I should hope most people realize that if the idea isn’t a secret, at least in part, ones claim to it is just that, a legalistic claim–which you might have to fight for in court should it ever be challenged.
Therefore, if we’re worried about protecting our “IP”, we’d be wise to avoid open source and instead keep “trade secrets”. Propriety software makes all the sense in the world if this is your concern.
Which brings us to MOD … Either you’re open source or you’re not.
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It would be nice if there is there a way for MOD to offer a “survivor’s software bundle” with all the plugins, documentation, and user software possible as either a download or on a thumbdrive or DVD for purchase, to help fund the last units and/or next phase.
I and others would gladly contribute for this and it might help everyone. Win-win!
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to clarify a few things…
the entire MOD stack (that goes into making the OS images) is opensource in the truest sense (as declared by OSI) with the exception of:
- OS build system (what puts everything together, but mod-plugin-builder is based on it so anyone with enough time and patience could figure that out, there is a live-usb ISO image that uses the same too)
- device “controller” firmware, what we internally refer to as HMI
there are of course some device/cloud keys, but those are not source code.
and a few plugins, but those are not the part of the OS image.
and on the other topic, IP and opensource can surely go together.
there was the somewhat recent case of muse group buying audacity, which is an opensource audio editor, they essentially bought the IP. It involved contacting every developer that contributed to the source code and having their permission for a license and ownership change, but they were able to.
muse group now owns the audacity IP, and they can do with it whatever they want (independent of we liking it or not too).
the idea of GPL is not so much that no one owns it, but more that everyone owns it.
software that is released as GPL (and other similar licenses) can be used, modified, sold and all sorts of things, by everyone. the condition is that you share back the same way.
there are cases of software that has source code public and available to see, but with restrictive license on what you can do with it. I tend to call that “source available” instead of “open source”.
and anyhow this is not a black and white matter.
similar to this but on desktop, you can have opensource DAWs loading proprietary plugins, or proprietary DAWs loading opensource plugins.
Mixbus for example is a commercial fork of Ardour (an opensource DAW) with its own proprietary plugins thrown in. Is Mixbus opensource? mostly yes… you can build the whole DAW and place the proprietary bits inside.
There is also the case of “opencore” business models, where a core of a product is open but extensions to it are not.
And lets not forget that even with all software opensource, there are always parts that are not. the bootloader cpu init for rk3399 and imx8mq used in Duo X, for example, these are binary blobs for which we do not have the code for.
for the case at hand, the important parts that can be reused outside of MOD are fully open - the audio server, the host, the web interface, the big majority of plugins… these are the things non-MOD products would typically reuse. plugins originally made for MOD that are opensource can be (and are) used on other products or general purpose desktops.
the minor details that are not open are for a potential protection against easy fakes/copies (though I dont deal with that part of the business, there might be more involved).
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Right, these thing surely go on. However, it’s adventures in legal-land. It’s fiction … My main point is chiefly this, and not only that, it countervails reality in so many ways.
For instance, here in the west, patents and copyright are generally enforceable. Yet, try to go to China and have them observe the same laws and claims thereof. It’s very hard.
Even still, whether in the west or east, these protections only have jurisdiction over events which take place in commerce. What if we simply want to rip something off for non-commercial purposes? It becomes very hard to enforce.
I personally think we can do something better with ourselves than stake our value/worth on IP.
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See, when companies regard a product roadmap, or their marketing plan as undisclose-able, precious IP, that’s when I think there’s a problem. The reason being, is that a brand’s success isn’t really about innovation, or outsmarting the competition; it’s about trust. A brand can weather all kinds of things if it’s customers have trust in it.
Right now, I’d say this is your main problem. At least it surely is for me.
So here’s the big question:
If you were to do it all over again–reboot, let’s say–what would you do?
Would you continue down this path of creating an ecosystem that relies on hardware you’re not able to produce? Rather, would you do something different?
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“We believe that we always have the backers in mind but I understand if it doesn’t always feel that way. How do you feel that the ground root supporters have been sacrificed? what can we do better?”
From one of the mods in the previous thread that I can no longer reply to on…
Here’s the final example of sacrificing your ground root supporters and especially the tier 3 people who were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and help the cause. We are left with nothing while you took our cash and sold our devices to new retail users so you could get more cash.
It’s pretty damn hard to try and be supportive anymore when this has happened. Sure, some of you who at least have your device can be all supportive to try and share patches etc which is great to see! ModDevices have also stopped me from risking my money on any more innovative crowdfunding companies. This is the first one out of quite a few that I’ve supported, have taken my money and given me nothing including at least one covid times project. It just goes to show you can’t trust companies that appear more established as opposed to solo creators doing it all off of their own back.
Sorry, my support for this company has run dry after years of waiting, their dubious business decisions and now this is the outcome. Never again. Will I get my Founders Edition one day? Would be something at least but I’m not hopeful. Lesson learnt.
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I just ran through the investment papers. What is missing is a sense of realism and tangible info. There is no reference to what went wrong (mea culpa?) and how this can and will be avoided in the future. No assesment / reference underpinning sales (realistic?) and profitability (cost structure?). I adore my Mod Duo X, but as someone with quite some experience in financing structures - the way this is presented now seems like shooting the breeze … I really hope you can do a better job and keep the Mod model alive in the future.
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** Opinions expressed here are my own for the sake of discussion and not those of the company **
The OS and a lot of plugins can already be implemented on other hardware and they already are so it does not rely on mod hardware.
However, the thing that I think is missing from the experience on other hardware is access to the store and sharing. I would love to see in the future, the ability for other hardware to run the OS with the user having a MOD account that they can use to authenticate plugins from the store and to share content. Much like how smartphone manufacturers can implement android and their customers have easy access to all the apps in the Google play store.
This would still require the company to still exist obviously to host the store and would require a significant amount of development to get everything working that way so here’s to hoping that MOD can get back on its feet and make this happen sometime in the future. I don’t see a way that can happen with just the community since hosting these platforms costs a lot of money. Though what is being done already without the plugin store can easily continue with the community and other ways of sharing can be used but they will likely be a bit less user friendly
I see a lot of suggestions made in this thread like “why didn’t you just do this?”. Well most of them are really good ideas and almost all of them were things we already thought about exhaustively. The fact is, everything takes time and money and in most cases, we wanted to do those things, they just hadn’t been done yet
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