Plugins, from LV2 project to your Duo / Plugin testers wanted

[dwek]

Dear community,

How’s your fiddling with the Duo going?

Pretty nifty toy, with almost 200 effects plugins with which to experiment, heh? And, as some of you already noticed, there’s more than twice as much waiting to be released on our plugin store.

Today, in order to publish these plugins on the stable/official repository that is accessible from the Duo’s interface, @falkTX has been doubling as plugin tester, debugger and curator. And that’s on top of all the software development work and outstanding forum problem solver role he has.

As we mentioned on a couple of threads, we’ve been coming up with a new system to bring you all the plugins that are clogged up in the elusive unstable repository, and that some of you have already been digging up.

This is how the plugins have flowed from their inception as an LV2 project to their publication on the store:

Everything is concentrated on falkTX

This is how we’d like it to work from now on:

With the help of the community, we can improve the stabilization process

We’ve got some of the documentation sorted, as well as some of the tools, but we really need to have a group of plugin testers that will help us move the plugins along to the end zone.

So, to sum things up, PLUGIN TESTERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
(I mean, reply to this thread or PM me so that I can add you to the group )

Thank you all and let’s continue creating the future of music effects together!

Dwek

[plutek]

let’s do this!
i’m already using some unstable, anyways…

[Skydiver]

I’d be happy to test out some plugins.
I’ve been using some of them.

Would it be helpful for users who have been using “unstable” plugins to give a list of the plugins they are using? This may help in prioritizing some plugins. These would have already been tested…

[ssj71]

I really hope we can get a good system to get some plugins moved over. Its a motivation killer to work to port your plugin and then nobody can use it or share it…

[dwek]

The more plugin testers we can have, the faster things should move along…

Should I sign you up then?

[eggsperde]

Sign me up, Scotty!

One thing about the whole process tho: its new structure looks good, but what about time? Should the handful of volunteers try all the unstable plugins? I think it would be lovely to have a new “pedal of the week”. Then everybody could have a play with one plugin for one week, try it out and give feedback and then it could be published. Advantages: workload becomes more steady, the non-testers have something to look forward to every week and the MOD team had something to post regularly on social media.

What do you think, @dwek?

[dwek]

Great questions @eggsperde.

What you propose would definitely make sense for future/new plugin projects.

Considering we have hundreds backed up and waiting to be reviewed, we’re trying to come up with a better means of communicating the more pressing desires of the community in terms of plugins (and features in general). There will probably be a sort of suggestion box and roadmap published somewhere in the MOD ecosystem soon.

Also, depending on the number of testers we have and what we define as N (minimum number of testers for a plugin) we can divide the testers and go through the unstable repository faster.

We can also define some specific values/thresholds for the curatorial criteria to make a preselection of the backed up plugins we want to push forward first.

[ssj71]

Sure, sign me up, I’m trying to focus on getting my plugins in the mod store in my “free” time but I’d really like to play with the ams.lv2 stuff too.

Also, depending on the number of testers we have and what we define as N (minimum number of testers for a plugin) we can divide the testers and go through the unstable repository faster.

We can also define some specific values/thresholds for the curatorial criteria to make a preselection of the backed up plugins we want to push forward first.

In linux audio there are often suggestions like “developers should work on this instead of that” but ultimately that always fails because the magic of open source is that people work on things they are passionate about. They work on it because they want to. Even if its duplicated effort or inefficient or whatever, sometimes if you steer that developer away from the project they’re excited about, you just find that now they are no longer developing. Not that it hurts to ask and talk about it, but I think we should keep the system somewhat open ended (e.g. rather than assignments, make tasks that people can volunteer for).

“We’d like plugins X,Y, and Z” tested more thoroughly."
“First one to vet a new Compressor wins the imaginary prize.”
“Hey I’ve just tested the infamous stuck and think we should have more testing on it, anybody else want to pitch in?”
“This forum guy wants a mutron, I noticed the rkr mutromojotron is like that, I’m going to start testing it”

I think that will help testers feel like they are able to work in their own way and still be really helpful.
I also think though that we should have a well defined set of standards on what testing is required, what’s a pass and what’s a fail, and how to document it.
I think 1 approach would be a new github meta project called unstable-testing (or similar) where there is exactly 1 issue per plugin. Any testers or other interested parties can go see what the status of that plugin is and why it hasn’t been moved to stable. Alternatively we could do a wiki page for each. Either way we’d have a standard form and people could see what’s left to do on the checklist and pitch in if they’re motivated to get a plugin into stable.

[plutek]

…funny you mention infamous stuck, which appeared 2x in my most recent performance pedalboard…

cheers, @ssj71!
.pltk.

[GMaq]

Hi,

I just want to sincerely thank all the user’s who are taking one for the team and devoting both their time and the potential stability of their device for testing. I personally want my MOD to be a brick for gigs like the 20+ year old stompboxes it has replaced so I’m choosing to not be a tester but I only have that freedom because of the generosity of others so please know your curious natures are appreciated!

Thanks also the MOD team for juggling what must seem to be an impossible list of tasks.

On one last plugin related note, is there any news on the status of Commercial plugins being added to the store with the current list of Unstable? I am very interested in having the OverToneDSP ones available as I use them extensively for recording and want to bring those sounds into my MOD.

Thanks again to all!

[eggsperde]

Hundreds of plugins sounds incredible! And overwhelming. Would it really help to do things in parallel? @ssj71 raises very solid points, in my opinion. The number of developers seems to be much much smaller than the number of users. Let’s make the platform more attractive for them in the first place! I don’t know if a wiki or github page is needed for each and every plugin, but a poor man’s solution could be to use the comment system on every plugins’ page. If we work in parallel, we would need a notification system - by working on them in a serial order there’d just be one active plugin topic at a time.

“The community”, on the other hand, is quite vocal about their wishes and I personally feel that communication with them/us is very active and positive. Sure, there’s always something to improve (I’d like polls for features/plugins) but in general what you have built up here, is a very friendly community centred around well-designed software.

[eggsperde]

I also think though that we should have a well defined set of standards on what testing is required, what’s a pass and what’s a fail, and how to document it.

This is absolutely on point. If rules are properly defined from the beginning it will save us lots of discussions.