MOD Duo X - Last mile countdown

We are moving our changes to our production servers right now, taking a time when hopefully not a lot of people are online…

It is really hard to give news when we are finalizing things. I want to say “soon” and “when it’s ready”, but I know they are not really answers.
But I can say from the board I posted earlier, only 2 yellow items remain.

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Thank you a very much for taking time in keeping us updated! It’s great to hear that things are still looking good and no major road blocks have been discovered. I know everyone is full of anticipation, but I’m glad the mod team is invested in doing this right given the pressure. As the owner of a few Sound Computers (ER-301, Norns, Aleph), I have watched how much goes into creating these versatile devices, and highly value having a stable environment to work in. So, thanks for being invested in that. I greatly appreciate the transparency, and I look forward to diving deep with it when it’s ready. :v:

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Some more news… the biggest issue we were facing got a resolution today.
We still need to clean up and put it in place in a proper way but was great to see a critical issue being resolved. Ooof
What a pain that was… with that out of the way it is only minor but very annoying bugs left.
I am pressuring @gianfranco as much as I can so we can define a final, concrete shipping day.
Hopefully before tomorrow ends we have that day confirmed.

Meanwhile, our “move big changes to production servers” is still ongoing.
We expect to finish this today; installing and updating plugins for Duo keeps working the same as before, so that’s great, we did not break anything, yet :sweat_smile:

Last but not least, pushing our nice Duo X to the limit to see how far we could take it, this is what it can do:

12 pitchshifter plugins in serie :scream:
This maxes out 1 of the cores on the Duo X. Considering it has 4… you get the idea :sunglasses:

Note that how well plugins do (or not) will depend on how well they are optimized for the platform.
These use fftw library, which makes heavy use of neon, plus can have some operations pre-calculated and stored in a file.

The Duo X is quite the beast compared to the original Duo. I am eager to see what you (the community) will be able to do with the extra power.

PS: for the more technical oriented people here, one cool fact: the default maximum number of clients in jack2 had to be increased, as I was able to easily reach the default limit of 64 while trying to see how many plugins I could load at once. I did not expect that to be a problem :joy:
Lifted the limit to 128 clients, should be enough for now I hope…

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beauty… thanks, @falkTX! :mage:

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Production changes complete! As bonus you get a forum with an updated discourse instance too. :slight_smile:

I hate to tease you like this, (actually I don’t) but we had to try if sharing pedalboards was working.
So I went ahead and created the first one! \o/

My musical skills are limited, so I just went with something that felt like made sense to me.
It is not supposed to be any good, just a test for the deployment.
Works as expected, including the “try now” option. Also loading of existing/shared Duo pedalboards, installing the missing plugins and all that usual niceness.

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Hi,

i’m new to all-digital music equipment, but thrilled to see how it may change my workflow and/or music style. Besides composition :wink: the pedalboard shows awesome features and seems to be exactly what I was looking for all the time. So many thanks on my behalf.

Right now I’m working on my bachelor’s thesis about in-ear monitoring over wireless and I’ve gone through a lot of trouble with Raspberry Pi, jackd and other things.

This device was intended to be my bounty and it’s getting more delicous with every update. So, cheers!

Another milestone today: our entire cloud infrastructure was upgraded to support the new device. In order to accomplish that not only we had to support another device/platform but also another entire compilation pipeline for the plugins and for the device image (with independent upgrades).

As you can imagine Duo and DuoX have a lot in common but their images are vastly different which requires a lot of things to be “in sync” so from the user perspective it just works. This was an interest upgrade because although we had built everything to support multiple platforms with different CPU architectures we never had any reason to use it. Until now.

So today is the first day that we got our first DuoX registered and running in Production (@falkTX was the lucky one to register DuoX #1).

This has all been cooked up in our DEV environment for quite a while. But having it running in Production is never free of a few surprises. All in all the whole process was pretty smooth.

This means one less post-it on the left side of our board!

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When will you sell upgrade kit for the Mod Duo ?

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Too early to be planning that, I think.
We are not yet done with Duo X, after we ship and get the units out, we still need to get CV working and other minor new features that were postponed for time reasons.

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yes, of course the priority now is to bring the full feature set to the X – glad to hear!

however, those of us who will have both units will really appreciate any possibility of bringing similar processing power to the original Duo, such that the unique capabilities of the two units can truly shine, side by side! …all in good time…

great work, all of you at MOD!!
thanks so much!

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Can the commercial plugins bought for Duo be exported to Duo X ?

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That is a good question… @acunha how do we handle this? Would be nice to have a public statement regarding it.

Now on the topic of shipping, we are progressing well with the last fixes.
There are no more blockers anymore, but we are still finding the best way to place the fix we were so desperately fighting a few days ago. (plus testing)
While that happens, other team members are going through all bigger issues we find and fixing them.

I really wish I could say a date right now when this is coming out, but it does not depend just on me.
But I can tell you it is a matter of days now, not weeks.

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Short answer: No

Long answer: All licenses belong to the person, not to the device. So licenses can be transferred between devices if the user so wishes (it’s a manual process for now so you have to drop us a request here or by email and we’ll take care - we already had requests like that in the past).

However licenses are not multi-devices. Which means each device you owe must have its own set licenses. So if you have licenses from the Duo that you’d like transferred to the DuoX, that’s ok. But only one device will be able to use it at a time. If you need the same license on both devices, you need to purchase it.

@laohuli Thanks for asking that :wink:

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good to know the license situation!

since many of us will be going down the road of running multiple MOD devices, it might be an idea to consider an alternate license option to allow a single user the freedom to install on multiple devices at will. this sort of flexibility would reflect the whole idea behind the MOD “ecology”! :slight_smile:

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Agreed - there are surely merits to the current one-device policy that don’t need to be debated here but it does feel a little out of place in an age where licenses for digital assets/software typically extend to multiple devices / platforms. I’ve purchased a few plugins and will likely buy a few more out of the batch that has come into the store over the last few months. So now I have to consider the added 10 - 15% cost to re-purchase all of those if I decide to buy a second (or third!) Duo/X.

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We hear you @unbracketed and @plutek. I can’t promise anything but only that we’ll discuss it internally on this matter and if it makes sense we have no problem in changing our policies.

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I understand your motivation @acunha. Yet, while I agree that the license belongs to one person and not one device, I would like to add that people buy more devices but devices do not buy licenses.

But maybe this is not even a real problem if your license-movement process is automated and becomes an instant operation?

@eggsperde There are so many licensing models out there. You can find so many variations of the same idea. I tend to like licensing models that make easy on people trying to use the same product across multiple installations and that’s why I said this will be discussed internally.

You guys should hear from us soon.

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Do you have beginning the expedition ?

To keep up the progress report…
Final steps are happening right now.

I am (literally right now :stuck_out_tongue:) preparing the “factory image” we use when shipping new devices, as a semi-automated process that anyone in our team can easily follow.
For the Duo, things were easier using the Allwinner “FEL” mode, it allowed us to write directly to the internal storage.
On the Duo X it is not so simple, it is now a procedure of 2-steps. First we flash the bootloader, and only then we can write the entire OS image.
Nothing we cannot handle, of course :slight_smile:

Something that happens after the initial OS deploy is a hardware test.
We start the unit in a special test mode, which then we use to ensure the hardware is working fully (control chain, usb, midi din, knobs, buttons, leds, etc)
We are finishing the last details to make sure we can test the units before they are shipped. (and ensure it all works)

Our current goal is to finish all remaining “initial release tasks” this week, so we can begin shipping next week.
We invited a musician to our offices next Monday, so he will be doing a final stress-test of the unit.
So yeah, our goal is to ship middle to late next week. :sunglasses:

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