I have a Duo X to use with synths and modular. Sold my 2 H9s when I bought it. It’s a great single box solution for an effects chain.
I’ve been involved in other early stage, open-source hardware/software projects that all failed to grab a sustainable market and revenue stream.
While the ability to create open-source pedals and make them available on the box is a huge plus, for commercial sustainability, the boxes need commercial vPedal support. The company must build relationships with pedal brands to craft branded vPedal versions of their hardware, or even virtual only pedals. To create a market that leads to financial sustainability, the box needs a large range of pedals from which any musician can build a modern board with.
For a successful company in this space, the open-source won’t matter to the majority of the customers. They will probably never use an open source pedal. But what they will do, is build boards of brand name vPedals to replace their over sized physical boards. Commercial modular builders currently create virtual copies of their modules for VCV Rack, an open-source virtual modular system.
Additionally, partnering with the vSynth companies to port synth VSTs would be a plus for that part of the community as well.
If MOD Devices wants to be successful, IMHO, it has to aim at a mass market product backed by partners that bring name recognition.
This feature would be something people would gladly pay money for. This would even work as a submission model. If I don’t pay anymore, my device isn’t useless without it, but maybe not as quickly accessable, because I’d have to tinker myself to get the desired sound. But it would still be possible.
I think if Mod Devices would work on innovations like this that can be sold, while keeping the platform open as it is, it would make the products that are already there more sustainable, while there’d still be cash flow. There’s enough unused potential already there to be explored/exploited.
@gianfranco As many have written: Please focus first on your health and family. If selling the company and assets provides you with better financial stability then do just that.
As for your options
Go full business, with (I hate to say this) proprietary core but sdks that allow for open source plugins.
Many investors are still very wary about open source.
What do you mean by this? Should MOD rewrite the entire stack from scratch? (aka set back the project several years)
It would also alienate pretty much all the third party developers that have contributed plugins, guis etc. Which means it’s even harder for the company to continue development.
I don’t think you are at all aware of the implications of what you are saying.
Hi Gianfranco,
I think to be open source it’s a great thing, but i don’t think this could be the selling point.Much more important to compete with other manufacturers, and to do this, offering a product that’s absolutely ready to use without minor bugs would be the right direction.If you think about making hardware, you should go full business direction.However keeping developers who creating plug-ins is a nice bonus too, maybe here at the community, we could patriot this with a small amount of money every year, so this way the software side can still develop.Someone mentioned here a partnership with other conpanies like Ableton or Reaper.This could be also a good option to survive.
Cardinal/Rack on a MOD unit has the issue of performance.
It runs, but in a very limited fashion, even if we get the UI working fully embed (without the need to run/install anything separately)
Or you think the current performance is already good enough?
To be honest Falk I don’t use it much as I can’t get it to run that well with the midi and the audio . And the lack of UI and running the VST just isn’t worth the hassle at present.
I mentioned a while ago about porting the modules separately and seeing if the forum members could do that for you if a wiki was produced so we had a how to do it log. We could do the leg work for you as there a quite a few modules but obviously other things were going on.
For 22.09 (and already available to try in the github actions latest builds) Cardinal will have a native audio standalone application, so you dont need JACK or a DAW, this standalone will connect to whatever is the default audio device similar to how web browsers and generic applications do.
That will make this easier to test. Let me verify now if this approach even works…
For the module porting, yeah it does work, main issue is having non-crappy GUIs plus dealing with the amount of IO these modules provide - they tend to have a lot of CV ports, which is hard to map properly to a modgui.
Ok, so I’m just going to outline what I would like as my ideal device… I really just want a nice tough case that is stage ready with good audio hardware, which I could put an embedded board into, raspberry pi or whatever, there’s enough carrier board formats out there which could work. Mod software (or equivalent) would ideally be converted to be a yocto layer and then it would be relatively easy to update with approved cpu modules. The company could make money off selling a pre-built fully running device or selling the DIY version.
However another option I would be interested in is to have a commercial unit that ships with commercial software, but has a nice easy way to flash an open source OS, similar to linksys and their routers which support openwrt/dd-wrt.
Finally though I’d probably even purchase any commercial proprietary unit if the company just valued Linux users enough to support controlling/uploading from Linux or had enough sense to make the device accessible/usable via a web browser
And who is going to write this software? It would then not be compatible with any current MOD offerings either? or is compatibility an additional requirement?
How realistic do you think is it that MOD writes a completely new software from scratch on short notice?
[edit: I misread your comment as “proprietary”, the GPL code is already commercial. Is that what you meant? Proprietary?]
The OS wouldn’t have to be completely re-written to be commercial… Red Hat is a commercial fork of an open source software, and the MOD OS is essentially MOD’s own fork of Linux—no reason that can’t become commercial as it gets more specialized and differentiated, without sacrificing the ability to support the existing plugins and devices.
the MOD software is already commercial. This has nothing to do with it being opensource or proprietary. the “Free” in “Free and OpenSource Software” includes the freedom to sell it.
there is a difference between proprietary and commercial.
opensource can always be commercial if one so chooses, but it can’t be proprietary as that is literally the opposite of open.
going proprietary makes investors happy in the sense that no one can then copy and reuse the code, it is not available in the first place.
for the state where MOD is now, it is too late go to proprietary. there are many GPL-licensed libraries that the core system and plugins use that are not feasible or even possible to turn into proprietary software.
coding everything from scratch as to allow proprietary use does not make any sense at this point.
plus as others have said, it basically alienates half the community and developers who have contributed a lot of things (from plugins, to guis, to other code) so far.
I am on the same side as well, as I have no interest on working/developing towards proprietary systems.
for a proprietary approach, MOD would be completely on its own without the community being able to help.
