I'm blown away right now at something.
I've lived my entire life buying things that "work how they work", and if you don't like it, don't buy it. There's always been hacking culture to work around things, but it's always a cat and mouse game between the dev counterculture and the vendor who keeps locking it down more.
Since I've purchased my Akai MPC III I've had a list of things I wish I could do. Mostly, I wished I could build my own plugins instead of buying the costly, and limited, plugins that they offer. I wish I could have unlimited plugins loaded. I wish I could access it over the network. And Akai being such a locked down company allowed for none of it.
Until they other day. They released firmware 3.10.1. With this a full SDK to build your own custom plugins. They enabled network access (complete with a ssh server). Screenshots. Unlimited plugins. Remote control and mouse support. It even runs an "autorun.sh" that you provide when you boot the device up.
This is crazy. I could never imagine how they went from completely locked down to the most open I could imagine.
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@alisynthesis @gabek Is it AI or are they worried that Chinese competitors with open, replaceable firmware have go at them?
I know it's the bottom of the market, but M-VAVE FM-1 has been the internet rage the last few weeks and it seems that Polyend open sourced their tracker code after feeling the pressure:
https://github.com/polyend/tracker-ce
My prediction is that a lot of music equipment is going to be much more open soon.
@alisynthesis It really does. If I were asked even a few months ago, I'd say there was a 0% chance of something like this ever happening.
@gabek agreed, it is totally wild. I have a new MPC too, and I'm pretty excited to be able to run a lot more plugins and virtual instruments in it.
AI makes companies do the craziest shit, doesn't it?