[LAD] [ANN] - Introducing the MOD - Your LV2 plugins at your feet

Dear Linux Audio users and developers We at AGR/HackLab are very proud to announce our newest creation: the MOD. In a nutshell, the MOD it is a programable Linux based hardware processor/controller with LV2 support. It’s main objective is to take the processing of any LV2 plugins to the stage. We will make a presentation at the 2013 LAC on saturday 11 of may, at 17:10. We hope to see some of you guys there! To make things more interesting there we also created the following - MOD Cloud, an online plugin repository - MOD Social Network, a place where MOD users can exchange their virtual pedalboards - MOD SDK - a software development kit - Control Chain - a hardware interface for external controllers You can see all costumer related info on the website www.portalmod.com/enand you can watch a video of the prototype working here http://portalmod.com/blog/2013/03/video-1-testando-o-prototipo/ The core software inside the MOD is Open Source and is being published at github (https://github.com/portalmod). You can download the LAC Paper at http://portalmod.com/blog/2013/05/mod-on-lac-and-berlin/. In it you will find an explanation of the MOD working structure, both software as hardware wise. As the MOD comprises both software (host and web-gui) and hardware which were not entirely predicted in the LV2 specification, there is some code to be added to the LV2 bundles in order to make it work nice on the MOD. All this added code refers only to the GUI and/or the controller. The actual audio code (the plugin .so file) is left intact. A LV2 without this extra code still will work, but will not have 100% of its potential. It will have a generic dashboard icon, no visible icon knobs and a generic controller display type. When using the MOD connected to your PC or tablet using the webgui you can browse the locally installed plugins (inside the MOD) as well as the ones that are online at the MOD Cloud, provided you PC / tablet is connected to the internet. The plugins from the cloud can be installed with a simple drag movement. The MOD Cloud is the place we expect to have the most interaction with the LAD comunity. It is a plugin repository divided in four sections: official, testing, contrib and commercial (any resemblance to apt-get’s sources.config is a mere coincidence...). The official branch is where you find the plugins uploaded by the MOD team. Most of them are well known open source plugins which were packaged with our gui and controller needed codes. The CAPS, CALF, INVADA, GUITARIX, MDA and many others are all there with custom HTML GUIs and some tweaks where needed. The testing branch is where you find all the plugins the MOD team wants to send to the official branch, but for any reason haven’t yet. The contrib branch is something like Arch Linux AUR. It is an open repository where you, the developers, can upload open source plugins to the MOD community. The commercial branch is just like the contrib, but for closed plugin to be sold to MOD users. We expect to generate a feasible business model for all LAD developers which intend to make a living on audio plugin programming. Last but not least there is the MOD SDK. The main goal of the SDK is to make it simple to set a GUI to your plugin before installing it into your MOD. We think that when using the SDK the developers will be able to concentrate on their audio code and spend the least amount of time with interface programming. The SDK has a package of ready available resources (pedal and rack skins, knobs, layout templates) with which you can pack your plugin by completing a simple wizard. There is also the documentation needed to create new screen widgets in order to develop your own custom plugin GUI. The included resource code can also be used as example. We would like to thank all the LAD community for its ongoing efforts towards having a decent plugin structure for linux audio. For the developers of the plugins we are packing we’d like to know whether you guys have any kind of objections. We believe that a lively MOD users community would expand the LAD plugins userbase and thus open new possibilities for developers. We hope you all like what we are doing and we would love to discuss further details with you. Kind Regards Gianfranco Ceccolini The MOD Team