EnochLight wrote: ↑07 May 2019
JiggeryPokery wrote: ↑07 May 2019
This is increasingly looking like a solution in search of a problem.
The "this is clever" factor aside, I just don't see too many people needing one of these in practice
So, serious question: if you had the ability to make real-life hardware boxes for many of your products that you sell in your Rack Extension catalog, and allow people to use said boxes on stage without lugging around a computer.... you mean to tell me that you couldn't see a use for it??!!
But that's not what I said, though, E,
please try and apply some level of critical thinking to their marketing spiel: I was raising a number of potential issues, based on information currently available, while appreciating I don't know all the facts and may be misunderstanding certain aspects, of why the system
might be limited, and why the market potential for
lots of dedicated devices probably doesn't exist. As I've noted before, smarter people than I may see something I'm missing, and I look forward to hearing those debates. In the meantime, however, the
desire to do such a thing is irrelevant when the tooling to do it might cost £100k for a product that will mostly do less than the software version, as clearly demostrated in the Roland article. Yeah, everyone would
like to do it, but these things are not going to be cheap. Would
you spend $500 on a hardware product that is just a $50 Rack Extension that ultimately probably runs better on a laptop, no matter how nice it looks taking up space on your desk or having to buy an actual rack. (If you say "yes", dammit man, gimme your downpayment right now...
)
That Roland above has a fraction of the functionality of the VST - so you will still need an app, hence you'll likely not be dumping that laptop on stage, unless you're sure you're only going to need to be doing filter drops and everything else is preset beforehand!
Pulling figures out of my arse
a bit (an educated arse, one might say), for me to do, for example, an Elk based Harmonic Synth device, and of course I
want one!, I'd be shocked if I could do it for less than $50k, and I'd guess it'd likely be double that to do a run of even say, 300. As I've said in a previous post, I wonder if it would be doable if it was pre-paid via Kickstarter, so you know how many you need built, so you budget and set a price and know in advance you can make a profit to make the effort worthwhile, and that seems to me the only likely way it could be done for a small company, otherwise it's just too big a risk for the small market size for one-man bands like myself. And yes, Props will steam in and say to us "hey! this means Cubase users can use REs via hardware thus opening up new markets for RE devs! $$$!". But that would be complete bollocks, because again, you're rarely going to have access to all the controls on the hardware, so they'd
still need the RE, which they can't use because
REs are only available in Reason! So they would
have to do VST/AU/AAX et al hosts for REs for that possibility to be enabled. That's literally a dealbreaker.
And frankly, even with a Kickstarter it still requires development of prototypes and testing, so it's a fair expense even before that, especially if one needs help implementing the electronics, for example. Remember, Props tried going solid with Balance and
they couldn't pull hardware off with their relatively substantial resources.
A large company like Arturia, and NI and the Korgs and Rolands of the world could probably pull it off, and I expect they will to varying degrees, especially if they make use of a lot of off-the-shelf parts as Roland are doing in their example, like I said, that seriously cuts down tooling costs where one can get away with it. My guess is still the
widest audience will be generic controllers that can host multiple products at once, loaded with a ton of cheap if slow microSD storage and RAM, and the ability to switch between stored products. A top tier product might use a cheap but fast SSD.
A realistic question: how many software instruments like that Roland would you buy for even $199, given you know the software is worth... $40 on a Black Friday? Now would you pay $500 for half an RE controller? And remember, it's really only available to Reason users unless every control can be hardware-mapped and not just half of them, because they'd still need the RE app for deep control. And that's assuming Reason 11+ is compatible with Elk, and an RE in the Rack can talk to a specifically-selected Elk hardware counterpart (though I'm gonna go on a limb and suggest that will be the case sometime in the R11 cycle otherwise PH's partnership doesn't really count for anything).
Finally, but most crucially, and people overlook this,
PH won't ever allow us to sell REs outside the shop! So for us to sell RE hardware (with or without crowdfunding), the hardware would have to be "empty", and the user would still
have to purchase the device from the shop, thus requiring there to be a method to transfer it via, eg, Authorizer on a PC to an Elk box, and frankly, PH have shown very little enthusiasm for developing even fairly basic shop mechanisms devs really do need. If PH sold the hardware pre-loaded, they'd want 50% of the
entire cost, so then that really pushes the price up to the end user even more, and we'd all have to ship every unit to them first, so they'd need physical storage and the ability to handle physical exports. (Some method from PH to pre-license remotely? ... maybe.) Would you pay $700 or $1000 for a software synth on Raspberry Pi, even if the side panels were real fake wood and not fake fake wood?
There's always someone willing to buy, I suppose, but my guess at the moment is the typical DAW user is unlikely to. Once you're in for $500+, you might as well go for an actual hardware synth with all the controls on it, whether it's a poly VA or real analog mono. The prevalence of software has made it easy to pack instruments and effects with lots of controls and features but conversely that makes it a shit-ton harder to port it back to actual hardware control, as anyone who's ever used a softsynth via a generic MIDI controller knows all too well.
So (if they haven't already) until Props figure out RE license handling and Cubase/Logic/Ableton support for REs, I'd suggest the chance of getting third-party REs as dedicated Elk hardware, is between nowt and bugger all, so I doubt anyone would even bother attempting a pre-fund campaign unless they were trying to scam you.