Sharing plugins manually from a device to another one without using the store

As it said - ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst’. Thank you for the update, it is what we need, at least me. Lack of the technical information and no warning notice before services stopped - that’s main source for boosting panic amplitude.

I wonder if pedalboards/plugins store url is hardcoded deeply?
Would it require a new firmware to point device to the alternative store, if one will be required?

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no, just an environment variable. but…

yes, this is a requirement. unless you want every user to ssh into the unit and edit some files manually.

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Yikes. I want to run down the street screaming at the top of my lungs tearing my (what little I have left) hair out.

tar, git, ssh…

“OH PLEASE! NO!”

It’s still haunting me. I can’t get away from it.

“'Scuse me, while I…”

ssh to /dev/null and pull /proc over my head.

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Hence the utility of writing an appropriate collection of scripts for making this nicer on the inexperienced user.

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Indeed, that is exactly the “being less engineery and paying attention to the UX” part I was refering to in the other thread ^^

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Okay guys, as soon as we got a new user in Discord with a MDX device, who cannot use his device due to services unavailable -
I’ve uploaded all the plugins I had for Mod Duo X (if you have Duo, do not use this archive, if you have Dwarf, it might work according to some rumors, but better find another source of plugins as well).
It is extracted from my backup, should most probably contain all the non-beta non-paid plugins (and some beta plugins) and updated a week or two before store gone offline.

Here is the list of plugins per folder, parsed quite roughly, so some lines contain some random metadata garbage instead of plugin names, but better than nothing I guess:

And the archive with plugins itself:

Here is an instruction sketch how to use this archive:

On the windows platform, uploading the plugins should look the following:

0) ---------------------------
Make a full backup of your device, just in case. At least it reduces chances to make things worse than they were.

1) ---------------------------
Download and install WinSCP from here:
https://winscp.net/eng/download.php
It is a tool for working with remote file systems via the SSH connection, that MOD has.

2) ---------------------------
Unpack the archive somewhere, there are hundreds of folders inside, each folder is a plugin bundle, that may contain more than one plugin:
image

3) ---------------------------
In WinSCP create a New session:
image

4) ---------------------------
Login is root,
password is mod,

Host name is the address you use to access mod device in browser, but without https:// prefix

Duo: modduo.local
Duo X: modduox.local
Dwarf: moddwarf.local

Press Login, (also you might want to Save session to evade filling all the fields next time)

5) ---------------------------
Now you have two panel file browser, left side shows your local files, and the one at right side is the remove file system of you mod device. Be careful, you are connected as root (superuser with admin priviliges), and have possibilities to break something on the device. Try not to remove or move folders on the device randomly.

Location of the plugins on the mod device is /root/.lv2
However, folders starting with a dot are considered as hidden, and winscp does not show the required folder. Click on “hidden” label at the bottom right:


Hidden folders will appear, and now you can navigate into .lv2 folder:
image

6) ---------------------------

Now you can copy plugins you need from your local file system to the device:


Disclaimer: Do it (or do not) on your own risk, bla bla bla, I am not responsible for anybody breaking their expensive device, just trying tying to be helpful. This way of modifying of MOD internals was never supposed to be used by non-geeks, I guess.

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Being super honest with you it makes me a bit sad to read this.
If there’s something that we all always did/do (MOD team) is to try to help MOD users, overcome our barriers, make a particular user issue the most important thing to get solved in a day or a week and getting really frustrated when you don’t manage to make the user happy. I can really say this from all the team because I see it and listen it pretty much all the time. A lot of us take even from personal time if needed. It’s not uncommon to spend a few hours trying to understand and solve the issue of a particular user and sometimes taking a few people. We take it somehow as “next time that it pops up we already know the answer”. So yeah…it’s sad to read that at least for me.

Answering you more concretely, I’m sure that even if things go to the most devil way imaginable, most of us will do our best to keep helping and putting this type of things together for the users of the platform and for the community. That was written before. I can’t really promise that we will all be able to give the same amount of time - after all we are humans, have bills to pay and probably if it goes really sour we will be the ones getting our lives more disrupted…so it will be probably at a slower pace but besides of being part of the MOD team we are part of the MOD community, so we will help the community.
Now it’s yet quite misty how things will go? Yes, it is. It is because we are fighting for the project to keep up, so basically new methods don’t need to be applied for this type of things, but simply the old ones will come back to life. This NEEDS TO BE our priority and concern number 1.

All these things that we are checking at the moment. We don’t want to, but I guess that sometimes things that we don’t want happen. It’s indeed good to set a plan B and the MOD team will be available to help if that is the plan that needs to go live.

Basically, you need to recall a backup from a device with more plugins. I guess this is what @gianfranco was thinking about.

This will certainly not “die” and I’m sure that someone will give more people managing rights there if needed. I actually can’t because (fun fact) I don’t have it. I never really needed it.

Please don’t take me wrong @ignis32. I just felt a bit sad/disappointed when I read your words.
Most of all thanks for all your research, putting it together and sharing how to use it here in your last post. This is exactly what I believe this MOD community is about - helping each other on these geeky things about music so you jump into making music fast (and in the meantime, you learn some IT skills…you never know when will you need it…after all making music is not the easiest source of income out there :slight_smile:

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I can confirm that MOD guys are super dedicated. I know that some of you, despite having changed jobs and working elsewhere are still involved and helping out.

No question about this. I 100% trust your dedication. And let’s remind ourselves that all of you are also users of the product and super active and involved members of the user’s community ASIDE from being MOD staff.

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Please, do not take it personally. I am not trying to say anything bad about you or the rest of the team.

Maybe it is a trauma from living 30+ years in a very unstable country, but preparing for the worst case scenario is my second nature, and this approach proved to be a good strategy. That’s how you end up being the only guy with medical supplies in wilderness, when somebody gets hurt, poisoned, or bitten by a goddamn allergic sailfish. If good things happen instead - whatever, you have not lost anything, except some extra efforts for being a prepper.

I believe in your intentions and dedication, but MOD devices as a whole are anyway quite black box from the end users perspective, and as an end user I should not expect any commitments on behalf of the company that basically almost does not exist anymore to be fulfilled, if I want to minimize probable losses. Not because I think bad of you, but because that’s the nature of chaos. More personal and specific commitments might be more reliable, but I do not feel like I should harass some mod dev personally asking him when he will fix plugin store for me in his personal time while working fulltime elsewhere.

You might have the intentions, but just have no possibility I can only guess how bad things are. Do you have compiled plugins and firmwares on your hand? Have you lost access to your own assets, build pipelines somewhere in the cloud and workstations in the office? If there will be a new owner, what will be the new policies? Would former team members be in position to share assets to public legally? If I do not know the answers, I have to act according to the worst assumptions.

I do not make predictions, I do not say my assumptions are true. I believe most of them are not. But also I believe that my actions should be according to the worst expectations, and I hope this should not hurt you.

Facts given are :

  1. To preserve functionality of the existing devices at least at the level where disaster happened - all plugin binaries and firmwares should be available, at least as an archive so people could grab as much as they can from what already existed for the platform. Convenience does not matter that much as possibility at this point.

  2. Services are taken down without a notice. It is not known if they will be raised again. I understand that you guys want bring them back, but there is no ETA. Basically, most of the people do not have all the plugins, some have not updated their firmwares yet. We even got a newcomer in the Discord who does not know what to do with his new and empty MDX that he managed to order somewhere and have just received.
    From the emotional side, it feels like we lost something we already had in our pockets, and I want it back. …my precious

  3. Services might be raised after some time, but theoretically we can get the opposite - forum going down as well, burying the chances of gathering plugins and firmwares by the community effort. No one knows why forum and wiki are still up and if we can expect them to be online further. While it is up - it might be a temporary advantage to use, even if it looks like a panic, whatever, I can endure joke or two on that, if precious time will not be lost.

And once again, my point of view on the further action is not related to my opinion on the MOD team members and their intentions and dedication, but to a lot of experience of unwanted participation in things going downhill. I hope that MOD will continue, at least because fx processors with a straight root access is something that should exist.

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So to clarify again.
If reborn is successful, attempts will be made to bring the “old” servers and services back up. So things keep on working as before.
If reborn is not successful, we (tbd who is “we”) will set up an alternative API end point that units can talk to, and at least the very last stable OS images will be made available, freshly built and now with them pointing at the new endpoints.

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Bro you are a f#@$ing saint! How can I support this effort if plan B has to happen? You can count on my support if it comes to this.

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Question: I just got my ModDwarf. I upgraded to the 1.12RC3. I checked the root/.lv2 dir, there are 134 subdirectories there. The GUI mentions 189 plugins (I assume some plugins are sharing the same plugin directory).

To get some of the missing plugins, I am currently building the tool chain of the mod-plugin-builder repository (currently doing the bootstrapping on my computer running linux). I am wondering :

  • is it a good idea to attempt to build plugins this way (following the instruction of the github with build moddwarf plugin-package-publish for the missing plugins) ?
  • if yes, what is the best way to know which packages to build that are missing from the Dwarf ? the directory names in the dwarf do not seem to match the package names in the mod-plugin-builder package directory?
  • or is it best to keep calm and wait a few days till the plugin repository is back online ?
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Hi @Joal_ban_Kluane

I believe that some of this directories are plugin bundles.

And for your question below, @falkTX already mentioned that is probably best to wait.

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Hello @falkTX Filipe,

I’m looking forward to when the plugin store and pedalboard sharing mechanism will be available.

Meanwhile, does it make sense to share the .lv2 files from my Mod Duo X and Mod Duo backups?
They are recent and mostly complete regarding beta plugins. Are there some files not needed when sharing?

Greetings and God bless, Marius

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On my opinion - yes. At least it would not hurt. I do not have a lot of beta plugins unfortunately, and would like to have them just in case, and will gladly download your lv2 folder for MDX.


From my side I’ve tried to compile everything I could for MDX with mod-plugin-builder with some success. Some plugin builds failed to me, for example ZynSubAdd, I do not know if it is expected or not.

Here are my guesses why (might be wrong though):

To my understanding, mod-plugin-builder does not contain lv2 plugin sources, it builds using original sources from external repos, and patches them to be compatible with MOD. (patches are contained within mod-plugin-builder)

This means, that if there are breaking changes in the original lv2 plugins source, it might stop building with mod-plugin-builder. That’s not a problem when plugin store is online, as it contains latest successfully built plugin binaries anyway. But if you need to rebuild all plugins from the scratch for yourself - it becomes a problem, as additional patching might be required before we can build some plugins on our own again.

If I am right - that’s why backups from the devices/store are still valuable, because without constant maintaining efforts from the MOD team - more and more plugins will stop building from sources without educated patching, that requires relevant expertise. If nobody will be able to fix that - original MOD binaries will be the only ones available for these plugins.
(Or I am just half-assed, original code is versioned somewhere in the place that I did not notice, and it is just my environment that differs from the one required to build everything.)

Anyway I’ve ended up with 498 plugin folders and 169 build logs files to analyze, with no idea of how good the result is. Quite a big pile to deal with, I feel a little bit scared.

UPD: That’s what have failed to build on my box at the moment. Quite a lot, I guess, about 1/3:
43 packages of 169 failed :

aether blop-lv2-labs blop-lv2 calf-labs calf camomile-examples-labs cardinal-bin chow-antapemodel chow-centaur chow-kick crypt distrho-ports-labs distrho-ports distrho-ports-v6 dragonfly-reverb eg-synth-dpf-labs guitarix-gxtuner lsp-plugins-impulsantworten lsp-plugins-labs lsp-plugins mod-tal-noisemaker oneknob-series-labs padthv1-labs pdlv2-labs pitchtracking-series qmidiarp-labs quadrafuzz-labs remaincalm-plugins rezonateur sfizz-labs shiru-plugins-labs stone-phaser-labs string-machine-labs synthv1-labs tal-reverb tamgamp-labs triceratops-labs wolf-shaper-labs ykchorus-labs zam-plugins-labs zam-plugins zeroconvo-labs zynaddsubfx-labs

Started the same build-all process for MDW, as soon as Dwarf newcomers keep appearing, so I could try providing some plugins to people who are not scared of SSH.

Can share compilation results, if anybody interested. However, I do not feel like I have enough expertise to say if my homebrew plugins are as good as the original, lol.

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this is not a problem, the MPB packages define which version to build, so sources match what is expected. building always from latest would lead to issues as that can be at a different version at anypoint in time.

the zynaddsubfx package fails likely because of https vs git protocol of cloning, with github removing support for git:// clones a couple months back.

honestly again, this is rushing things.
store is offline at the moment yes, that is bad yes.
but really, by the time you end up figuring this out and putting something in place for downloads, the situation is resolved by either switching things back on (ie, being legally able to pay them again) or me and a few others just pushing that new endpoint with the “new” store.

you are even trying to build all the packages, this is not intended. quite a few things in MPB are experiments that are not meant to be used.

these steps and experimentation is something you dont have to do by yourself.
me and others are here to explain things if you just ask first.
and there is a common interest to keep things working.
but really just wait a few days until we get a resolution on the insolvency. it is literally less than a week away now.

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this is not a problem, the MPB packages define which version to build

Great, with the strict versioning it means that nothing will not fall apart that way, and my dark prophecies are mistaken. Thank you for the information.

It complaints about libdl.so.2 , so I believe it is something about tuning my build environment by adding proper dependencies. Does not matter actually at this point, do not bother :slight_smile:
I will try to find solutions for the failed builds for sport, but there is no practical reason for anybody else to spend effort on this.

I understand, and I will not be disappointed if/when services are back and my builds will not be required. It is self-justified exploration this point, to be aware what I can do and what I cannot by the practical experience. Not going to go deeper than it is fun, unless it will be clear that there is a real need.

For now I am convinced that with the provided toolset, we are able to have the plugins library for existing devices one way or another even if the bus factor somehow hits community far beyond any reasonable expectations.

With that in mind, it is much easier to wait for things to resolve, always nice to have a plan B for plan B.

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Hey @ignis32

I feel relieved that someone has such an eagerness on resolving this issue if things get so really really south as your prophecy because this “things” are so way beyond my poor IT capabilities and also, really happy to read @falkTX reassuring once more that everything thing gonna be sorted out one way or another. :sunglasses:

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if you’re interested in further development/building, you can try out the containerized MPB. I was able to get it up and running very quickly. @cbix has some auto-built containers that I’ve had great success with:

I think I used the “moddwarf” tag.

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just out of curiosity I also tried to build a few plugins for the dwarf that I missed to download before the store went down. I use the wsl layer in windows, installed alle dependencies and so far everything built as expected. I even tried some of the plugins you listed that failed - they build without errors for the dwarf.

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