Didn’t Blokas manage to run the MOD platform on a Raspberry Pi? I don’t think that was a monumental effort.
You could provide your own MOD “distro” and monetize the plugin store. Maybe directly selling SBC / case kits from the site for people to assemble or, for the one rightfully not inclined to, sell fully assembled units at a higher price. The advantage of this approach is that you’ll basically be working on demand on the hardware side, and need very low backlog on parts.
That would be a software approach to run MOD on PI like MODEP. Blokas surely put in a decent chunk of effort to achieve that.
Developing kits is a hardware project. That takes a lot of time, manpower and money to design. The fact that it’s a kit doesn’t make it any simpler to develop than an assembled device. It just means the manufacturing process has some fewer steps that are inconsequential to the difficulty of developing the new product
As I said, I think that hoping to fix a broken situation without some investment is just high hopes.
I installed MODEP myself on a regular RaspPi I had home, with a plastic 1$ case and an USB soundcard I had laying around. It worked.
Really, a “kit” would just be a bundle of already existing pieces you can find around on the net in the various SBC dedicated stores. I hope a potential buyer would buy them directly from you instead of other places and such generate more revenue.
The only mandatory step would be compiling a version of the MOD software stack that runs on a RasPI. That would be the manpower investment that I’m afraid can not be avoided.
But, really, what would be the other solutions? Assuming you get investment, what else are you considering? What options do not require to spend the money you get? You’ll need to pay for webservers and man power, right?
You said that you need to get back your IP. Fair. What is that IP? Company name? Websites? Software? I assume most of the software is open source and available on git anyway. What’s left that is not in your hands and can’t be replaced?
Just to clarify, it’s not me. I no longer work for MOD. I’m a community member speaking with experience
I get it.
This may be a road they go down but it’s still a huge development effort. It’s not just compiling a version for pi, it’s a complete overhaul of the licensing and registration system. Pi doesn’t have a hardware license that can be registered the way mod devices are. There would need to be a user account system (huge job), os licensing system (huge job), plugin licensing system / DRMs (huge job)
This may be the way they go, I don’t know. This would be a reasonable alternative if its not possible to manufacture Dwarfs. But I doubt they will be adding bluetooth or wifi or developing a new hardware device in order to reboot
My post may have been guilty of the same thing because it only lightly implied my position on the subject at hand without stating it outright, so let me amend it:
I don’t know if this makes any business sense, but I don’t see MOD being able to rival Line6/Neural/Avid/Akai (or whatever other company you can think of that makes either multi-fx boxes, or groove boxes you can load effects into, etc.) by going “full business”. Not to mention the fact that it would alienate a key portion of the already relatively small user/fan base (@falkTX @brummer I don’t want to speak for you, but I assume I’m correct in understanding that major contributors who believe in open source, wouldn’t be interested in MOD as a non-open source product).
My post was pointing out the fact that MOD could be a much better “custodian” of the open source software that it’s hosting, and that could be its main strength. When I first fired up my Dwarf, the interface looked really cool, but it didn’t take me long to start spotting the “jank” mentioned in my previous post. Then, after a somewhat frustrating experience with the version of Guitarix multi-amp plugin available for the Dwarf (I could make it sound good, the interface was a hot mess), I learned that there’s a more mature version out there that every Linux user can access. That made me really question the point of using the device.
To summarize, even though I’m not a Linux user, and frankly, I’m not that interested in the technical side of the open-source scene (though I do appreciate open-source software greatly) I think that going “full community” preserves the only advantage that MOD ever had over the competing products. Now, this may make zero financial/business sense, but I’m not even going to pretend I’m competent enough to touch this part of the issue.
I’m Intrigued by the ideas that @Steve_Lee was putting forward
Perhaps it is possible to have both a Foundation that is OSS that is more welcoming to the community of developers that creates the OS while there is a Company that make the proprietary hardware devices. I don’t know all the ins and outs of exactly how that would work but it seems logical at a high level.
Sorry to jump in here, but this feels like an extremely badly informed “finger pointing”, with all the respect.
Cardinal is developed 100% out of MOD. It happens to have one of the MOD developers as an instigator (@falkTX) and thanks to this he decided to put some effort and time from "out of MOD hours (aka “free time”) to make it work in the MOD platform. That’s what geeks do…fortunately in some perspectives, unfortunately in others. But, Cardinal IS NOT A MOD PROJECT. That’s exactly why it is still in beta and sort of weird for usage on a MOD device.
I understand that you don’t like it or don’t need it, other users do like it and/or need it. What you are doing is exactly like “pointing the finger” to some MOD user because he develops a plugin that you don’t like and/or need and makes it available for all the MOD community.
I’m not sure if you are informed of how costly implementing a Bluetooth chip in a device is. I am (from out of MOD work as well) and trust me if a Dwarf had one it would easily cost 800€ instead of 500€ (or even more!). It’s not simply snap a chip in the circuit and sell devices. When you use anything with wireless communications you need to pass through a process of certifications extremely expensive to be able to put it in-shelves (we are talking about dozens of hundreds of euros in certain cases just for that). To put it simply I tend to say that you would need to assure the authorities that your device doesn’t mess up with emergency communications and other things.
A cheaper solution would be using pre-certified modules, but that still has a cost not only for the module but also for certifications (although lower) and would add one more thing that could ruin the production, especially in times of supply chain issues.
The way that MOD solves this, in my personal opinion, is actually pretty smart. You can simply stab a dongle on USB port A and it works. There’s room for improvement, sure, but works.
There’s always room for improvement in any product. But just those that never even tried to develop a product and keep themselves as users of products developed by other people can’t really understand how frustrating is sometimes to see the need for some feature or improvement but get stuck in technical, legal, financial, or hundreds of other issues.
Please note that I’m writing in my personal name here, as someone that knows a couple of things from inside MOD and also about developing physical products. I’m not by any means trying to disrespect you or your opinion, I’m just trying to give you some perspective on what you are pointing.
Well that is actually a common mindset problem in product (hardware development). What you did is a DIY project. A lot of people think that if you can do it in DIY in a certain way you can jump to a full production the same way. A lot of people after doing it discovers that that is not so simple.
I was one of those that use to think like that. I even think I still am with a few things…but then reality hits.
(This is the 12-hour layover of flight #7 of a 3-country move which is coming to an end tonight!)
This is indeed something that should be done moving forward. “Presets” (or patches, programs, snapshots, whatever you want to call them) that showcase the functionality and give users some starting point.
Most ME units come with a set of patches for different genre, even some with direction mention to real players (see Guitar Rig’s patch names for one.)
HOWEVER
I don’t recall ever using one such preset myself and most of my fellow players would say the same. A friend of mine owns a ~$2500 Fractal MK3 and after sifting through hundreds of patches he found two “kind of usable” ones. Boss’ SY1000 has some of the corniest patches one can imagine-- kind of a ‘drunk Enya meets a bored Ian Hammer at the threshold of hell and both want to commit suicide’ type of sound. You couldn’t use them as a background layer for a dentist waiting room soundtrack in an episode of Days of Our Lives.
This is not properly documented – actually MODs never had a real instructions manual, just the wiki. But an actuator CAN be mapped to various parameters simultaneously and even perform different functions on each of them.
HOWEVER
MOD’s decision to implement this with “Control Voltage” devices created a lot of confusion and didn’t make users’ life easy.
There are only a handful of controllers – some of them aren’t even in the market yet.
Check info on the Roland A-88 MK2 here.
This is almost entirely a matter of taste. In the US back in the 2000s, music stores had a whooping 30% return rate on all of their sales, because people came in and bought devices but then “it didn’t sound the way I expected”. They started charging restocking fees to curb that.
If you ask the Horseman of Apocalypse he’ll say every MOD effect is garbage, but others will say there are some very nice sounding plugins there. And, to my taste (please read well: MY taste), Shiroverb owes nothing to $100+ plugins out there.
I concur with you and others that there might have been some decisions and choices on the management side that made things worse and/or created a background that, confronted with chip shortage and other things, made MOD’s mission much harder. It seems that MOD finances were never stable enough even with the wind blowing their sails.
I also agree that cost estimation might have been a problem, but it’s hard to say without internal info. Suffices to say that Raspberry Pis doubled in price in Europe between 2021 and 2022.
HOWEVER
Don’t give yourself too much credit here. This has been discussed before and other members have pointed to some of those issues “out in the open” before. With elegant words or in the Doomsday Committee style, people have argued that some things needed to be reworked in the short term.
MOD attempted to get the devices out – for good or bad, to fulfill pedges, etc – with some things in need of rework, and then other issues popped up as the user base grew.
I am not excusing MOD’s management here, btw.
You would need to ask @Pranciskus about that. I personally don’t think it was that easy, it surely involved a lot more people, and it is much more limited than what we get from the Mod team.
HOWEVER
As the owner of both a MOD and a Pisound, I can tell yo this: the hardware level and the extent to which you can customise the former is far superior.
When you say
I can say the same. It works. The following question is: are you going to tour with your band with it? I think MOD had their sight on that reality.
(It is at the very least an enormous presumption from IK Multimedia that, by providing a velcro strap with their iRig units, it enables people to play live with that flimsy toyish plastic thingie. Unreliable, fragile, poor sounding and depending on an iPad and a $99 software that you still need to spend another ~$150 to make it sound “kind of ok”.)
Most people don’t even know how expensive is to just slap the USB or Bluetooth logo on your device. And some controller chips explicitly require that it uses the licensed logo. Robert from Primova Devices once said his products would cost twice as much if he used one specific chip for USB (can’t tell which one right now).
In conclusion:
HOWEVER
What we are trying to do here now is to revive MOD and try to suggest a viable model for business sustainability.
How can we contribute to the success of a new business takeover and/or continuation of the MOD platform? For instance, can we users step up and offer our time for creating the presets that would become that “newbie user friendly” layer? Can the coders among us help fix some of the issues with plugins?
I’m sorry, I made a mistake there. I referred to Cardinal instead of the Guitar Synth plugins. I deeply apologize again.
If I only have the choice of buying a device for $500 which is NOT suited for my use and one for $800 that does what I need it to do the choice is quite simple.
In fact it DOES work. In fact knowing that I would have gladly added a certified MOD bluetooth dongle from the site, if this had been available as an option.
Problem is the GUI had been designed for fast, touch, small screen usage. Since it’s not, even with bluetooth connection via a dongle, I think it’s evident that bluetooth/mobile interfaces were an afterthought at best, while IMHO they should have been a driving point in the design.
Sure it was and I don’t expect everybody to even try this, but since the company needs to restart from zero, I think something like a paid installer for a very limited array of compatible devices, let say only RasPI4 + PiSound, for starters, could be a way of making the platform survive for the moment.
Tinkerers can already install the software themselves, if they wanted and have the skills. All the others can buy a reasonably priced precooked option.
@Tarrasque73 you have clearly never put together all the necessary parts to get mod running on a pi. Modep did not just happen over night. I have been writing scripts for pi-stomp to run mod 1.12 on 64bit for well over 6months…most of that time was spent getting things stable and installing smoothly. So I think you should try settling up the mod stack from scratch on rpi os lite image to see exactly how much effort goes into software stacks alone. Creating an image to install on pi is way more than slapping some software in an image and shipping it off.
Sure, but what’s the alternative? Nothing comes free.
I see people proposing things in this thread which keep being rejected because they cost money, dev time, or else.
What do we expect from this “reboot” thing? Maybe I dont have exactly clear what a reboot is. If it’s intended to be “someone cash in enough money to buy back all the IP and continue like before with just a company name change” then I’m afraid it will not happen.
Well, I think the intention is precisely to avoid that.
Whereas this thread started with @gianfranco proposing the full-business and full-community options, whereas his personal desire seems to be some community-based alternative, and whereas no plan for the ‘reboot’ has been fully disclosed, users have been chiming in with suggestions for one alternative or the other, and some users even brought their own expertise in so as to propose hybrid options.
You’re right, MOD cannot go as before, no amount of money will make it sustainable.
Maybe it’s time you actually start to contribute to the mod environment instead of just bitching in here…just a thought
This is so true! In rehearsals I use the iRig HD with Bias FX2 on the iPad and I am planning to replace that with the Dwarf as soon as I have a nice set of presets to use.
This is one of the main issue I would say: having a good starting point with a few well-curated pedalboards, some snapshots for variants and good documentation. And a working download/sharing site for plugins and pdealboards.
The new MOD company might initially focus on pulling together what’s within reach: (partial) IP, rallying the community behind them and restarting a (“the”) store and download site again.
Once that is done as a starting point, the existing users can continue with their daily business of making music and possibly contributing here and there, e.g. by creating or rating presets. Technically more advanced people may even contribute plugins or improve and fix them, e.g. to address the parameter ranges, add documentation, etc.
And the new MOD company may consider how to get new users to grow revenue: by offering commercial software add-ons, maybe getting the remaining devices out (requires getting hold of the current stock of parts and enclosures which will cost a lot of real money), and possibly preparing software bundles for other hardware. But all of that requires at least a minimal company.
Getting assets of MODDevices GmbH might not be so easy and fast, though. Ideally, any insolvency administrator would try to sell off everything as a whole and that might be out of reach for @gianfranco and @friedsilence with just the minimal investment (or rather promises thereof) they gathered. It might take a while for the assets being split into parts and being offered for sale individually and even then some other investor might buy them and not consider current users, people not having received their crowd funding device or the general community at all…
So let’s see where we can chime in and help getting a new company bootstrapped as that would be in our best interest for continued use and improvements of the MOD software and our devices.
I wouldn’t even go on tour with my Duo because of the UX, so it’s a moot comparison.
I could try with MODEP on a RasPI+PiSound solution, though. I don’t own one but I know some one does. The UX is basically the same, so it has the same drawbacks, but costs less and is smaller, which has some advantages, I think.
I agree with this except on the second point. I think UX is still vastly insufficient for my needs (live on stage guitar playing) even now, not just the initial one.
We all are trying to do this. The only thigs is that MHO is that without some hefty changes in the company itself, which mean expenses there is nothing to revive.
Of course the community could help, but let’s be honest. The “pedalboard of the week” idea failed miserabily. Maybe the community isn’t big, invested or skilled enough for this.
The area where the community has been more productive is plugin submission. Not good, all purpose premium pedalboards. This is scary. I leave to other to interpret the meaning of this.
Pledging for a device I’ll never receive, while knowing it has major flaws putting my trust in the company that they were able to solve them isn’t contributing for you?
So tell, me please, what contributing is.
Should I donate more money? Should I write plugins? Should I fix the GUI? Should I write documentation?
I’d like to hear what I can do. Keeping in mind that there are things that people might now want, be able, or be in position to do.
Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear, but I think you misinterpreted me.
With iRig and Pisound you also need a tablet/computer to set up patches. The main advantage with MOD is its superior and sturdy hardware plus the advantage of operating standalone over the iRig (which needs the iPad at all times) and the Pisound, that has one single button that you can customise… by editing a script on your computer.
(My complete Pisound cost more than 200 Euro, when the Pi3 was a mere 60/70 Euro. Its input is only 100 kOhm, inadequate for guitar/bass.)
I’d easily go on tour with my DUO X and not touch a computer all the time through.
I thought my answer was concurring with you there? I proposed many posts ago going full business and changing the overall mindset around the product, did you not read it?
You sure can. Zynthian too. It has some advantages (I’d place Zynthian on top of Pisound due to its onboard interface).
I might be wrong, but to me it looks like (and I always felt as if) the MOD concept was for a standalone unit, like taking a HX Stomp or G100 with you.
Maybe the MOD team can give their opinions here?
I bought a DUO X precisely to have encoders and buttons to activate/actuate on presets I would have prepared before, not live. Loving or hating the UI, my guess is that it was not intended for live performance, just like BOSS Studio – an application for preset editing. Boss explicitly recommends not connecting their units to a computer via USB live.