These are hard to answer for mostly even the company founders or CEOs.
As a person who had relatively enough experience working in and interacting with software companies of different sizes and with different departments of them, “What do we gain?” or “What do we loose?” are usually questions which give birth to discourse internally also. Long discussions happen which does not make everybody happy in the end.
I can empirically say that the decision makers are not usually right with the answers either.
Because these are very complex matters and it involves taking calculated risks and relies on a cocktail of assumption and previous experience if it exists.
No company has 100% control over their success and usually great deal of that is not planned but happen as happy accidents. (Not talking about gigantic enterprises or conglomerates which have scaled into a huge operation to increase precision on these calculations.)
Basing my thoughts on this, I think the benefit is somewhat indirect.
If you take actions which enables more creative individuals with passion to use your products alternatively and make it easier for them to make creative tools for themselves and the community the ecosystem around your product will grow in time with your “little” investment.
When the ecosystem grows, it will become a direct selling point for your product. You’ll get that relatively for free because passionate people will grow the ecosystem by their own will.
SDKs, low level libraries, or MaxMSP interfaces might not seem very appealing and also niche for the major part of the community but eventually people will make tools using these building blocks which would appeal to a wider audience. Then people will talk about it and probably a few of those tools will become indispensible and set new standards about how we approach these machines.
I believe this would benefit Elektron greatly and make it more special.
Just about the “defining statement”. Yeah not something solid which I can think of now. Some part of the community would gain a lot though. I have the belief that it would benefit them indirectly.
Oh I completely agree about the potential benefit of opening up their code. I actually work on open source music instruments, so I am wholeheartedly in favor of that. I just don’t see any benefit to them making a statement beforehand. Like “We like open source (or community development, or w/e), but we can’t do it yet” just seems like it just creates expectations that they might fail to be able to meet. Where coming out of the blue with community tools would be a massive PR win for them, and it gives them the flexibility to not do that without any community backlash.
For what it’s worth, I recently had to merge about 100 patterns from multiple projects into one project for a live set on the DT. I was using a similar sample pool among the lion’s share of the projects. That’s key, because otherwise I’d be stuck noting the sample assignments manually. The biggest obstacle in this case is having to wait for the sample pools of every project to load (45 seconds or a 1 min x 100 patterns x 2 projects (source/destination)…
This is the best method I could manage:
Save a second version of each project you’re pulling patterns from
Proceed to delete the entire sample pool of every ‘backed-up’ project you’re pulling from
Create a new project with an empty sample pool
Copy and paste the patterns you want in the live set project manually, loading between projects
Reload the sample pool in the same order present in the source projects
Yes, you have to load between two projects constantly. At least in this method, you don’t have to wait for the sample pool to load each time, at least it took 2 hours instead of 6 or 8
It’s kind of why I’m partially coming back from DAWless. Those boxes are sitting between grooveboxes of yore (think analog ones, no preset), and full fledged computers. They’re incredibly more powerful than the first ones, incredibly less than the latter. And usually the pain point is sample management, where you end up doing a lot of weird backups you’re not even sure you’ll be able to restore if something goes awry.
I ended up keeping only the A4 MKII and the Syntakt (also had a Rytm MKII and a Digitakt), whose projects are fully and more easily backup-able, as they don’t handle samples at all. I’ve got a better peace of mind knowing that if my Syntakt burns I can buy another one and restore everything.
Of course some people don’t care about backups or sample management. And to these people, those boxes with samples are fine.
Don’t count on the apps mentioned above. I bought the A4 version, ran into severe instability and reliability issues and ended up with a refund from apple store. The dev didn’t bother to answer any questions asked while trying to sort it out
Digging this up once again looking for a solution to move patterns around on the ST and DNII (for the DTII I’m eagerly waiting for the next Elk-Herd update) that doesn’t involve tedious copy/paste maneuvers on the machines directly.
I purchased the above mentioned [FUNC] version for the DN but it hasn’t been updated for the DNII so that leaves me blank for both machines.
How complicated is using a Sysex tool for someone who has never used one before? Elektroid seems to check all the boxes and would potentially run on my computer (MacOS) but looking at it over on github I’m just lost and I wouldn’t even know how and where to start. I know Terminal exists on MacOS and that’s about it…
I’d imagine the main problem would be that the data contained in the sysex is particular to the manufacturer, almost certainly specific to the product, and possibly even subject to change with every firmware release. The structure of the information is proprietary, and often needs to be reverse-engineered, although, I gather from something @mzero said recently, that Elektron do appear to support him by providing info about changed formats due to firmware updates.
For many synths, you really didn’t need to know much about the patch SysEx messages… and generally VERY easy to reverse engineer. And so, generic patch librarians exist that can support many synths.
For more complex devices, like all Elektron devices, the problem is that “patches” don’t exist on their own. There are many different parts: patterns, kits, sample pools, etc… that are interrelated. While you can easily dump and restore one of these elements… if you try to move it while restoring it… typically you’d have to update (and re upload) all the related elements.
I don’t think Elektroid will let you re-shuffle patterns like elk-herd will. Almost certainly because it doesn’t decode the internal structure of the various elements of a project.