MOD is at a crossroads - and needs your input

[Azza]

this one is simply using the mDNS protocol to find what services are advertised on the network. And shows the details.

[jetztgradnet]

@Azza

Regarding pulling virtual cables, I once proposed the ability to insert a new plugin between two connected ones by being able to drag/drop it onto the connecting cable. It’s a small thing but would have improved the UX by saving the painful task of disconnecting/reconnecting. A Undo/Redo stack could have beeen nice too.

This is also how mobile apps like Bias FX do this. There is not as much flexibility in connecting pedals / components, but maybe a “simple mode” could allow this kind of insertion / modification without too many clicks and using mainly drag and drop.

A mobile application would be great, but given the current state of development resources not really realistic. Still, as the API is kind of open, some industrious indy developer could start building something and publish this as a nice add-on.

[Steve_Lee]

I totally agree. As a software developer I’ve picked an acoustic instrument to maximise right brain use and minimise getting all left brained as soon as I touch a mouse

[Steve_Lee]

it’s more though - red hat are system integrators, providing many value-add services based on the OSS software they contribute to.

[ignis32]

@jetztgradnet

A mobile application would be great, but given the current state of development resources not really realistic.

Yep, it all sounds like a late feature request for the developers that already have a new job.

[Azza]

@jetztgradnet

This is also how mobile apps like Bias FX do this. There is not as much flexibility in connecting pedals / components, but maybe a “simple mode” could allow this kind of insertion / modification without too many clicks and using mainly drag and drop.

The drag and drop could really just do a “basic” insertion using the two first input-output pair. Anything more complex would have to be done the “usual” way. But that would address 95% of cases already. The same is when deleting a plugin. The link it was part of could be replaced by a cable, avoiding having to do 2 extra connections. Even that would make the mobile user’s experience way more bearable, as it would combine with the drag-and-drop to make insertion-deletion way easier.

[Steve_Lee]

As I added MuseScore above I also say that they provide MuseScore.com as premium subscription value add service on top of the free open source product. Could that model inspire something for MOD platform. Service to sell and access premium plugins and boards? I personally don’t really like that though as a native open guy.

Musescore Pro | Musescore.com

Why should I become a premium member?

MuseScore Editor is a free and powerful software to write and play sheet music. With MuseScore.com, everyone can share their work and expose it most engagingly. We believe in the power of community and sharing your work with others. For that reason, access to all scores in an online catalog transcribed by a trusted user community is entirely free.

Want to have online access to scores across all your devices? Share your scores easily with choir, band, orchestra, or classroom? Publish your work to be seen by people around the world? MuseScore subscription allows you to view scores ad-free, download, and print them.

In addition, you help guarantee the continued existence and quality of our open-source software with your monthly or annual support. Thanks in advance for supporting MuseScore!

[Tarrasque73]

@Azza

Another issue is the limitation in number of controls, normally solved by plugging in a midi foot controller. The problem then becomes that it’s not easy to know the state of the controlled parameter. On the mod itself, you have the leds for that. But not on the Midi unit. It would have been great to be able to have that reflected on the MOD unit’s screens.

Well, most popular midi foot controllers that I know, including mine, have leds that indicate footswitch status, so I don’t really see the thing as problematic.

After all, all rackmount effect units that were the hype in the '90 were absolutely “pedalless” so you were forced to buy a foot controller anyway (and that’s where mine comes from, by the way), so it would be unfair to blame MOD for this.

It’s true that those rack units were designed to work with a “patch”, or “snapshot”, in MOD terms approach, so they complemented naturally better with a FCB1010, for example.

[acunha]

@Tarrasque73 your feedback express a lot about my frustrations, as a musician, with our own product. A lot of those problems were constantly in our discussions/backlogs, and we tried to tackle them at different points in time.

Thanks for your concise and very focused feedback!

[acunha]

@Tarrasque73

Exactly what I think. Even on a tablet or a PC browser, having all graphic elements completely decoupled from the pedalboard engine backend would wave a much better design choice. The backend should only relay business data through BT to the frontend device, and all graphics and other heavy payload should be in the scope of the frontend control device.

Unfortunately we never got enough funding to allow for a more robust and prolific engineering team. Anyone who has been through mobile development understands how painful and costly it is to get this kind of product publicly available. This was always in our roadmap but we just never got to it because so many other things were higher priority with very limited resources. This was a personal failure of mine to be honest, never been able to deliver on that front.

[acunha]

@ignis32

Like it is not “complete” without an external device to configure pedalboard, not self contained. Luckily, these days everyone has a phone, so phone client/app should solve that. In theory.

Bluetooth dongles mostly do not work (v5 seems do not work at all, probably due to old kernel/bluez stack), and are too slow anyway, because all the graphics are quite huge to load via bluetooth.

Ideally, we’d have to support wifi as a way to manage your device remotely from your phone. Similar to how you setup a Sonos speaker. The hardware/software effort is much bigger than it looks, I guess…

[acunha]

@Steve_Lee

Raspberry do sell hardware and support the OSS software they need. Can you learn from Ebon and team? They do have a foundation but they are not easy to setup and run.

Raspberry has a completely different approach to their business. There are several key differences that makes them unique and we would for sure fail trying to follow their steps.

I’m a software guy and know little about hardware. But I’ve read a lot about Raspberry Pi and their business model. From the top of my head:

• They sell millions of units per month (that was always their plan, scale).
• They delegated 100% of their production so they don’t really need to take risks when putting units out there. There are no logistics they have to solve. The official distributors are the ones with all the risk of producing / selling the units (which then they capture profits as well).
• They worked extensively to make sure their hardware design was clean and could scale without requiring a lot of patches because component X is no longer available. They made specific compromises in order to achieve this.
• They are more or less a non-profit organization (distributors still take profits though).
• They designed a product built on top of a lot of existing technologies. There was not a lot of novelty in their solution other than being cheap and small. Not dismissing what they did, but their challenges are completely different than ours.

Let me know if there’s anything I listed which isn’t accurate (high chances that I’m misinformed here).

[Steve_Lee]

Useful, thanks. I thought of scale but didn’t realise they’d delegated production, just had a deal with Welsh manufacturer. I know the original design was effectively subsidised.

[eggsperde]

I agree with all of the points raised about UI and connectivity experience; they are good starting points for improvements. Yet, I somehow feel that if these were implemented, Moddevices would not have a significantly larger user base anyway.

Unfortunately.

[Jarrydactyl]

Any update on when well get access to the store/alternative route for installing plugins? i’m itching to put on the dragonfly reverbs…

[ssj71]

@Azza

Also, I don’t know if the MIDI protocol allows to query the MIDI unit for it’s initial states : when I plug in my cheap controller, I need to tickle the rotary buttons to cause a midi message to be sent to the MOD in order for the current value on the know to be reflected by the plugin parameter.

No, that’s just part of midi. No queries. Something has to initiate an event.

[falkTX]

MIDI2 has bidirectional communication and controller query. but I dont know of hw that makes use of that right now

[ssj71]

I like the usability discussions and specific suggestions. These parts of the system are open and we should be able to hack and prototype new UI ideas.

Otoh, suggestions to lower the bar for people to create plugins is really misguided IMHO. We need more quality plugins, not quantity. I think we should be thinking much more of ways to get the community to help curate the plethora of mediocre plugins I put in the store and make useful presets etc. I think the tone challenges were a good idea. Could we nominate some captains of tone? Get some pedalboard committees? Something like that could help improve things without any changes to mod software.

[jesusperezsv]

What I’m not understanding is, are we waiting for something now? because this two past weeks we were waiting for a reboot to happen, but now?

[jetztgradnet]

@jesusperezsv

are we waiting for something now?

We are waiting for @gianfranco to share the results of the survey and hopefully some plan on how (and whether) he and @friedsilence are planning to continue with MOD…