Well… it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Despite impressions, a lot has happened in the MOD world recently, and I wanted to finally share a more personal and deep update with the community.
First and foremost, MOD Audio has moved from Germany to Ireland. In parallel, I personally moved from Germany to Italy with my family. It has been a period of major transition on many fronts 
From the outside, MOD may have looked unusually silent over the last couple of months. In reality, there was a considerable amount of work happening behind the scenes.
Working together with external partners made communication much more difficult than before, since many things simply could not be disclosed publicly while they were under development. At the same time, effort was put into transforming MOD’s technology and infrastructure into something that could be shared and operated across different companies and products.
Last month’s launch of the Anagram Marketplace marks the beginning of a very new phase for MOD.
For the first time MOD has recurring revenue streams for infrastructure and cloud related services that help sustain the open source ecosystem without relying exclusively on hardware sales or immediate ROI pressure. This is extremely important for the long term health and independence of the platform.
Over the last two years, I’ve been almost fully focused on helping make the Anagram happen and then integrating it with the Marketplace infrastructure. With the Anagram Marketplace launched, I’m back full time on MOD again, with a handful of very exciting prospects.
Plugins, plugins, plugins!
Our focus on the next months will be on plugins, from multiple different angles.
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New releases from existing and new vendors
- Just wait and see
- Just wait and see
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Better tools and workflow for creation of plugins by the community
- improving builder.mod.audio so that community members can more easily build, package and distribute their own plugins. More on that coming very soon.
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An active effort to polish and publish what is already there
- There are many excellent plugins currently blossoming inside the community. Some are already extremely promising and simply lack proper UI polish or integration work. @jon is preparing a renewed plugin promotion effort and get them into the official shop.
ALABS
On the community side, projects like ALABS Starless are exactly the kind of contribution we hoped to encourage when we opened the Dwarf image.
While we want to support these efforts as much as possible, we still need to figure out the best ways to make innovations flow upstream into the official platform.
I’d like to set up some sort of testing flow that allow us to incorporate such contributions with confidence. Suggestions are welcome.
I’d also like to leave here a shout out to @AndreaDelSignore for the effort. It is one of those things that simply keep the flame lit.
Neural Modelling
On the neural side, NAM A2 looks extremely promising, but AIDA-X still remains the best technical solution for the Dwarf today.
RTNeural continues showing impressive efficiency, but keeping training pipelines updated remains a challenge.
On the other hand, in case NAM A2 delivers as we expect, we could even consider an integration with Tone3000, especially since the API already exists.
Both to be seen.
Team and collaboration
Among the many changes that MOD is going through, an important one relates to manpower and contribution. Our original working model and team format does not apply for our current context and there will be changes on how we advance. More on that very soon.
For now, @acunha is back, taking care of our cloud systems and making sure everything is running smoothly. You can see by the new look of the Forum here, which had not been updated since before the reboot.
@falkTX is involved with other projects and will not be able to dedicate active development hours to MOD for the time being. He’ll still be around, answering questions and helping when possible, but not actively working on the platform day to day.
Very important to mention, @jon keeps active with support.
A couple more surprises and news on this front will come soon.
Coda
The last years forced MOD to transform from a small hardware startup into something much broader: an ecosystem, a platform and, increasingly, a shared infrastructure for musical experimentation.
We still have difficult decisions ahead. We still have limitations. We still have unfinished work everywhere you look.
But the important thing is this:
The lights are on.
The servers are running.
New plugins are coming.
People are building.
And MOD is moving forward.
Thank you all for continuing to be part of this strange little corner of the audio world.
My dearest wishes from Arezzo, Italy
Gianfranco, aka The MOD Father.
