I am very positively suprised by the friendly responses to this news. You are really nice fellas!
Considering the strong feedback about MOD’s OpenSource philosophy I was wondering, if you have considered the reboot as a gGmbH? This legal entity is a not-for-profit organization with a similar structure like a regular GmbH but is not subject to most of the taxes. Still, it allows to pay reasonable wages to employees and management. I have no idea, how realistic this is but given your contributions you might be able to pull this off for some of MOD’s business areas.
i came to MOD attracted by the Duo X as a Vocalist (frustrated with the built in effects Rolands RC505 looper) a musician with two hands free most of the time
it won my attention being a customizable FX-Device based on (enough)open source to believe → it will work, when the company goes where everything goes one day and it might even get hacked (in the best sense) and expanded if not perfect already. a lot of those effects i was looking for already integrated. and not closed enough to force me into a regular payment to be usable. awesome! the device i need and a future i like to see, to support and can believe in (not sure if this profit thing is going to continue endlessly… doubt it though
as a B2B filmmaker i would have loved an 8 Channel Audio Mixer with a built in “MOD-FX-Channel strip” especially in the last two years where i had lots of live streaming gigs
a 6 band EQ, de-Esser, a compressor and a limiter… what about ducking maybe…
having the usual hardware one would use i thought of/missed the potential MOD flexibility more then twice…
i came across a lot of youtubers and podcasters and streamer who all would love to have a device with the guts of an dwarf but with an XLR Mic input and 48v (for their SMB7 with your perfect channel strip and recording capabilaties…
pretty much a mini rodecaster.
what i’m trying to say is there is a lot room for a lot of different specialized devices beyond guitarists or even musicians.
all these devices would need development and a fitting marketing taylored to the customer it’s aimed at.
at this very moment the dwarf is the only Hardware that makes sense to produce as others described before with the mentioned reasons for that. but i would love to see pretty much all the potential devices mentioned above. or a modular core dongled to a touch monitor and an audio interface…? something maybe like
A “HalfDwarf” (should it be called “Gnome” then…?)
but i would also love to see someone putting it on a new RockPi 5 Model B with it’s rockchip rk3588
and maybe visualize the audio gone through MOD-effects…
and boy would i love to “install it on my de-googled android tablet” as an apk one day with a few synths maybe a looper… just to turn back happily to the device with the wonderful haptics
this is where it feels like a split and where MOD Fathers options come in:
is what i would vote for
maybe even a registered association of sorts. i imagine payed developers, funded by community, industry partners and sales in the store. being supportive to those tinkering developing new plugins, presets etc to sell on the store.
the actual MOD-Team could join forces again to produce offerings (plug-ins, PRESETS,etc) in the store for they know the system best. in my dreams you have a paying system like on gumroad with “pay what it’s worth” - with a set minimum if desired
meanwhile we all try to fulfill the part in Gianfrancos 3. Option that i like: enjoy ourselves and the beautiful people surrounding us
and in the next three years (maybe months - who knows) the opportunities will arise to produce the missing tier3 dwarfs and hopefully way more! mature and awesome, flawlessly working. with an inviting UI for “beginners” and a deep rabbit hole to dive in for the “advanced” - practicalists and tinker-heads if preferred. together celebrating that music won again.
May that be the foundation for a stable “full business route” company working in close collaboration with the association and the community surrounding it
way to long (sorry) still missing so much…
this is obviously no businessplan nor is it a great solution for those still waiting for their dwarf (I am one) or those loosing their income and jobs or even the envisioned future and it might seem wrong to those able to calculate the future
to me from what life thought me it is a healthier way to see it and go for
and i’m obviously not the only one who invested multiple ours reading and thinking, reflecting…
What you guys made is more then just a few fx-devices to me. clearly the Team but also a lot of us “customers” can feel this project and the vision to be right and it makes me gratefull to be part of it with a bit of money and a bit of - let’s say interaction
I don’t want to pile on, given the current situation of the company, but this is such a bizarre statement.
Different people prefer different things, of course, but there are many reasons why a “rational, informed customer” would choose Helix/HX Stomp over Dwarf, especially if they care about reliability and polish. Much lower latency, and arguably fewer noise issues (my noise issues with Dwarf were not as severe as what other users routinely reported on this forum, but they did occur, and they weren’t - as they often are - setup specific, because recording at the same level with Stomp made the noise floor considerably lower). Helix is modeling the gear guitar players actually care about instead of providing the users with an eclectic set of interesting but unpolished plugins. There’s also the ease of use. Only one of those devices is actually standalone. A race to create a simple patch in HX Stomp and Dwarf would start with the Dwarf user sprinting towards the nearest PC. Oh and there’s the resale value. I could go on.
I got interested in the Dwarf because I hoped it could be both a decent guitar modeler and a groove box in one unit. It felt short in my estimation on both accounts, but I did appreciate the promise of an ever-evolving box that perhaps may be worth revisiting in two or three years. Alas…
As for the future of MOD, I’m not particularly interested in the open-source aspect of the device, I just want something that sounds great, looks nice, it’s easy to use, and is reliable. Equally, I feel like that was just about the only major advantage of MOD over a more polished competition. Communities form naturally around good products. Line 6 users may not be able to write plugins for Helix, but they do have an impact. Helix used to lack in the reverb department - which users often liked to point out - and now it has three amazing studio quality reverbs that are arguably better than what other modelers offer. That’s just one aspect. Even if we discount the sponsored stuff, content creators organically produced so many videos/comparisons/guides about the Helix, that I can randomly type “helix vs. real fender tweed, same IR” in my YouTube search box and I bet you I’ll find something. Try the same thing with Dwarf.
Again the purpose of the above is not to pile on, I think the success of MOD would be good for the customers. It’s to illustrate the point that “the community” is not a unique aspect of MOD. The unique part is that with an open-source approach some members of the MOD community could meaningfully assist the development team, which is not really the case for most of the competition.
I have a Duo X to use with synths and modular. Sold my 2 H9s when I bought it. It’s a great single box solution for an effects chain.
I’ve been involved in other early stage, open-source hardware/software projects that all failed to grab a sustainable market and revenue stream.
While the ability to create open-source pedals and make them available on the box is a huge plus, for commercial sustainability, the boxes need commercial vPedal support. The company must build relationships with pedal brands to craft branded vPedal versions of their hardware, or even virtual only pedals. To create a market that leads to financial sustainability, the box needs a large range of pedals from which any musician can build a modern board with.
For a successful company in this space, the open-source won’t matter to the majority of the customers. They will probably never use an open source pedal. But what they will do, is build boards of brand name vPedals to replace their over sized physical boards. Commercial modular builders currently create virtual copies of their modules for VCV Rack, an open-source virtual modular system.
Additionally, partnering with the vSynth companies to port synth VSTs would be a plus for that part of the community as well.
If MOD Devices wants to be successful, IMHO, it has to aim at a mass market product backed by partners that bring name recognition.
This feature would be something people would gladly pay money for. This would even work as a submission model. If I don’t pay anymore, my device isn’t useless without it, but maybe not as quickly accessable, because I’d have to tinker myself to get the desired sound. But it would still be possible.
I think if Mod Devices would work on innovations like this that can be sold, while keeping the platform open as it is, it would make the products that are already there more sustainable, while there’d still be cash flow. There’s enough unused potential already there to be explored/exploited.
@gianfranco As many have written: Please focus first on your health and family. If selling the company and assets provides you with better financial stability then do just that.
As for your options
Go full business, with (I hate to say this) proprietary core but sdks that allow for open source plugins.
Many investors are still very wary about open source.
What do you mean by this? Should MOD rewrite the entire stack from scratch? (aka set back the project several years)
It would also alienate pretty much all the third party developers that have contributed plugins, guis etc. Which means it’s even harder for the company to continue development.
I don’t think you are at all aware of the implications of what you are saying.
Hi Gianfranco,
I think to be open source it’s a great thing, but i don’t think this could be the selling point.Much more important to compete with other manufacturers, and to do this, offering a product that’s absolutely ready to use without minor bugs would be the right direction.If you think about making hardware, you should go full business direction.However keeping developers who creating plug-ins is a nice bonus too, maybe here at the community, we could patriot this with a small amount of money every year, so this way the software side can still develop.Someone mentioned here a partnership with other conpanies like Ableton or Reaper.This could be also a good option to survive.
Cardinal/Rack on a MOD unit has the issue of performance.
It runs, but in a very limited fashion, even if we get the UI working fully embed (without the need to run/install anything separately)
Or you think the current performance is already good enough?
To be honest Falk I don’t use it much as I can’t get it to run that well with the midi and the audio . And the lack of UI and running the VST just isn’t worth the hassle at present.
I mentioned a while ago about porting the modules separately and seeing if the forum members could do that for you if a wiki was produced so we had a how to do it log. We could do the leg work for you as there a quite a few modules but obviously other things were going on.
For 22.09 (and already available to try in the github actions latest builds) Cardinal will have a native audio standalone application, so you dont need JACK or a DAW, this standalone will connect to whatever is the default audio device similar to how web browsers and generic applications do.
That will make this easier to test. Let me verify now if this approach even works…
For the module porting, yeah it does work, main issue is having non-crappy GUIs plus dealing with the amount of IO these modules provide - they tend to have a lot of CV ports, which is hard to map properly to a modgui.
Ok, so I’m just going to outline what I would like as my ideal device… I really just want a nice tough case that is stage ready with good audio hardware, which I could put an embedded board into, raspberry pi or whatever, there’s enough carrier board formats out there which could work. Mod software (or equivalent) would ideally be converted to be a yocto layer and then it would be relatively easy to update with approved cpu modules. The company could make money off selling a pre-built fully running device or selling the DIY version.
However another option I would be interested in is to have a commercial unit that ships with commercial software, but has a nice easy way to flash an open source OS, similar to linksys and their routers which support openwrt/dd-wrt.
Finally though I’d probably even purchase any commercial proprietary unit if the company just valued Linux users enough to support controlling/uploading from Linux or had enough sense to make the device accessible/usable via a web browser
And who is going to write this software? It would then not be compatible with any current MOD offerings either? or is compatibility an additional requirement?
How realistic do you think is it that MOD writes a completely new software from scratch on short notice?
[edit: I misread your comment as “proprietary”, the GPL code is already commercial. Is that what you meant? Proprietary?]
