6 Mar
2016
6 Mar
'16
9:43 a.m.
On Sun, March 6, 2016 12:54 am, Ben Bell wrote:
On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 08:06:42AM -0500, Paul Davis
wrote:
Another contributor to the difficulty of making a successful keyboard/DAW
hardware solution is the amount of effort/time required to build and run
the system. It's a good couple of man years of effort to wrap it all up
into a simple UI. Add the cost of manufacturing hardware and it quickly
become very difficult to compete on price with the established players.
It's a minefield to build a simple system that just works. Realistically
it requires building out a complete stand alone distribution.
Lionstracs got close to that goal but in the end the sales dried up. It's
very hard to compete with cheaper solutions made by manufacturers who have
economies of scale on their side.
The MOD is also struggling from the latter problem too. It's very hard to
keep costs down until you are manufacturing large quantities of product
and that makes it hard to compete with the other established players.
Giving away product or drastically reducing price to compete doesn't do
much for the bottom line and doesn't help pay salaries or rent. Trying to
sell something that is priced higher than the rest of the market is hard
unless you have the brand loyalty of Apple.
They need all the support they can get so if you are serious about doing
something cool with Linux Audio Hardware invest in the MOD and help them
grow so they can compete with the big players.
If 50 LAU'ers had bought a lionstracs that might have made the difference
between the company surviving the great depression of 2008 and going
bankrupt.
As far as I know, not one LAU'er actually paid real money for a Lionstracs
console. The MOD is significantly cheaper so they should get more traction
with this community.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
They say that those who do not know history are
doomed to repeat it.
I say that those who do not know history should google for "lionstracs
keyboard", although they may still end up repeating history anyway.
And before that there was the OpenNeko, and from memory another one before
that too. I don't know the history of what happened to Lionstracs but from
memory they were all taking the approach of taking a general purpose
computer
and welding a synth keyboard onto it. They wanted to have a standard
desktop
GUI and run any software available for Linux. Definitely lots to learn
from
there.
The reason I like the Nord Stage is because it's very much the opposite
direction. It's not a workstation keyboard. It's not bringing a standard
computer UI to a keyboard, it's taking a musician-oriented view of the
interface. No menu diving, just buttons, knobs and switches to control
the things you need as you're playing.
There's also been a lot of change since those projects. Useable solid
state
storage and the explosion of interest in smaller form-factor devices are
two
major game changers. Len mentioned the MOD duo, which is much more the
sort of
direction thing I'm persinally interested in than a frankenserver running
KDE with a bank of ivories attached.