Introducing MOD Labs

[gianfranco]

Greetings dear members of the MOD community.

I bring you today a very special announcement.

Those following our latest activities have already realised that this year is packed with exciting news. The new CEO and the corporate growth, the Commercial Plugin Shop, 1.0 Footswitch release and MOD Duo X are some and there is more on the way

Today I bring you one that feels very special for me.

Community has been a big thing for MOD for a long time. We’re deeply rooted in Linux Audio related technologies and we rely a lot on Open Source software in general, from the Linux kernel to the audio plugins. The use Arduino technologies and our very own ControlChain protocol are good examples of how we relate to Open Source also on the hardware side,

Up to now, most, if not all, of the community related effort has been done mostly on a personal relation basis. Working with open source takes this process to a different level, with a bigger involvement of external contributors. @brummer @harryhaaren and @ssj71 are some of the many examples of people who engaged in some sort of cooperation or support with us under the open-source mindset and I was lucky enough to have had the pleasure to personally meet, communicate and work with such amazing individuals.

At the same time it is a pleasure (from my very egoistic POV), it is difficult to keep things to a personal level as the number of people grow. Not only the personal relation becomes a bottleneck as the lack of an official communication channel makes things a tad unprofessional. Each personal contact has its own dynamics and rules. Each employee has his/her own set of rules and level of disclosure and there is some criticism - which I find absolutely understandable - about our “lack of definition” in regards to Open Source and how we officially relate to it. We’ve been struggling with these bottlenecks for sometime already and I have even made this concern public at LAC 2017 with the mention to put in place an Open Source Committee.

Our proposal to tackle this idiosyncrasy is named MOD Labs.

In a sense, MOD Labs was born as soon as we did our first attempt to embed Linux as a hardware plugin host back in 2010 and has grown as we released/contributed to open-source software as well as on the many hackathons we participated. It has always been here, it just did not have a name.

I’ve introduced the MOD Labs during the keynote presentation at LAC 2018 and from now on you should be hearing more and more about it.

The launch of MOD Labs represents a very important step because it embraces the communities at an institutional level. We’re starting with a webpage, an email address, a forum category and a blog category, but much more is coming. Also, we’ll gradually incorporate everything that is community related into MOD Labs.

More than that, since there is now a definition of space, we’ll be able to have people from the community taking over some management - the publishing of plugins, for example - which will cease the “bottleneck issue” that we are currently having with some of the processes. Basically, users will be able to upload plugins to the MOD Labs area of the Plugin Shop without our supervision, but moderated by the community itself.

If you feel like taking an active role, please send a message to labs@moddevices.com

For all MOD Labs related areas, access will be open and anonymous. But it will, at the same time, provide the interface for deeper relations with the company to which some access control will be required. The beta testers group, for example, is one of the first of these interfaces. I will come soon with news about it. Integrations with existing systems and joint development of products are other examples of such potential relations.

From now on you’ll be hearing about the MOD Labs more and more. Keep tuned.

The Labs page is already online at https://www.moddevices.com/community/modlabs

Hope you’re all as excited as I am.

My dearest wishes to everyone

Let’s step onto the future!!!

[plutek]

Just noticed this a few moments ago on the MOD website… what a great initiative!

[lunardigs]

This is so cool. You guys are really advancing things in the Linux pro-audio space. You’re very brave too! Meanwhile, most of the industry is still sitting on the sidelines waiting and watching for a critical mass. Not you though; you’ve decided to become leaders. Awesome!

[harryhaaren]

I’ve introduced the MOD Labs during the keynote presentation at LAC 2018 and from now on you should be hearing more and more about it.

The MOD Labs has lift-off!

All I can add is that my experience following and collaborating with MOD over the last years has me confident in the dedication to creating and maintaining good community relations. I can see that as MOD grows it needs to have a story for how it interacts with Open-Source projects and communities, and I feel MOD Labs is a good solution to defining that.

Although my time for OpenAV development is limited by “real life”, I do look forward to future collaborations with MOD Labs. In particular I’d like to progress on enabling multi-dimensional live performance. Think along the lines of live-input, synths, loopers and step-sequencers all running on MOD, tightly integrated with hardware controllers to allow the user to shape their performance to exactly their intention… its only a small task!

I’ll sign off this post now, but hope to communicate with Labs more in the near future as OpenAV makes more progress in making the Ctlra hardware access library ready for production usage.

Thanks for the informative update - and looking forward to what comes next! -Harry of OpenAV

[dreamer]

Only now reading your post here @harryhaaren - When I saw your work with Ctlra I was also thinking this would be great to integrate with MOD!
Hope you are still able to work on the project as tighter integration with hardware devices through a unified layer would certainly be very interesting to add.