Forum

.... long rant typed.... read... deleted....replaced by....
I'm disapointed with this.....but understand if its your business model. However, if you are going to charge for support make sure your product comes with proper documentation and please make it clear on your website that you are providing software updates and support for one year only with each instrument.
I think this decision will ultimately destroy the community spirit that was forming on these forums.
Anyway this is starting to get long again so Im off to use some of my one year support.....

I think that there are three separate aspects to this:

Forum - my opinion is that access to the forum should always be open. When buying a product, especially one so niche, this would be the first place I'd look. Granted, John's talked in the past about being undecided about whether to close the forum to buyers only, but I think this would be a serious mistake. Given the cost of a forum is negligible these days, my first assumption if I came to buy something and couldn't get access to the forum until afterwards would be that there was something to hide. Likewise, making users pay for access to the forum after a year is false economy, since you would lose the direct feedback from your most loyal customers - all that would happen is that someone would set-up an unofficial forum elsewhere and you'd lose that customer relationship;

Support via telephone/email - personally I'd not have a huge problem if this were a pay-for resource once the product was bedded-in. A lot of companies give you 30 days free telephone support after buying and then introduce a charge - this wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me providing the forum continued to address the common issues;

Software Release Support - this is the one that really worries me at the moment and I'm hoping that things have just been blown out of proportion. If it was a case of paying (a la John's example of Apple) for major releases once the main product is stable I'd not be adverse to this, but at the moment I'd agree with what some other posters have said where essentially we're performing free testing on an immature product. I've had my Pico for around 8 months and have had a non-beta release for less than a week. I was happy to buy knowing that things wouldn't work correctly, as I wanted to support what I saw as a good product and was willing to take the chance, but if I'd known that this would essentially reduce my software support by eight months I certainly wouldn't have been.

I think that given that all of this is currently speculation, someone from Eigenlabs, probably John, needs to set their stall out sooner rather than later and give people some clarity. It's a valid point that you make about the potentially long lifespan of the product meaning a limit to revenue in the longer-term, but equally you need to realise that people have given you the benefit of the doubt by buying a product that may only have a few month lifespan if Eigenlabs got into difficulties - introducing additional costs for loyal users at this stage would dramatically increase the chance of this happening, especially given the currently closed nature of the software. If the additional charges were for peripheral functionality, like the iOS app, additional soundfonts/sample banks, or even something like the OSC device driver that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I'd happily pay for these if it meant they were delivered quickly, supported well and contributed to the longevity of the company - if paid content ended up being things like Workbench or even EigenD in general I must say I'd be furious.

Thanks for the additional thoughts John. Perhaps my views have been coloured by what happened to my account, not being able to post on the forum at all nor get to the software section of the site at all was very alarming, if you dont plan to have that happen to users as soon as they reach a year of ownership then some of my rants are void.

I have no problem with you charging for a variety of support stuff after a year. I just dont think the forum should count, especially as community feedback is essential and only a subset of the userbase contributes to the forums in the first place.

Although I dont feel I should have to pay for workbench, I would if it came to it. If at any point in the last year I had thought I could have paid to get some of the features I wanted within a reasonable timeframe, I would have. Paying for minor updates I have a bit more trouble with, and losing access to download versions of software that were already out when the year ended really did not go down well with me at all.

In an ideal world I really preferred the model where you would offer additional software 'native' instruments and users could pay for those. But considering all the other changes to software that are the priority these days, and unknowns about quite how many people would buy these additional instruments, I can see why you may not think this will be enough to bring in the revenue you need for further software dev.

Its a tricky one, users have come to expect much from this world of cheap hardware, and there has been quite a fall in the total cost of ownership for a range of computer-related music stuff over the last decade. I doubt its ever been easy to be a relatively-small hardware manufacturer, and certainly not these days. When I look around my room at the hardware I have accumulated over the years, very little of it has incurred additional costs for me as the years roll by, But when I look at all the software I have purchased, I spend considerable sums every 12-18 months in purchasing upgrades to major new versions, and I expect to.

I feel kinda bad for opening this can of worms, and my opinion may be tainted because for me support has meant in nearly every instance me asking 'can I do this' and the answer coming back 'not yet', which is quite understandable but not something I feel like paying for.

It was certainly my intention to use (and often highlight) the Alpha as a live instrument. But I want to use it the same way as I would use a MIDI guitar controller, wireless keytar, and various other devices), managed centrally by my core software (currently Apple MainStage).
However, given what I am now seeing as the plan for going forward, I'm seriously considering giving up and putting my Alpha on ebay for sale.

Sigh

And on a final note I will say that the design ethos of the Eigenharps is to be a musical instrument, a thing for making great noises, and for doing that live, onstage and with other musicians. This is our primary focus. It is not intended that its primary purpose is a piece of studio equipment, highly integrated into a rich studio setup, however useful it might be in that category.
John

Hi Mark,

To answer you original question in this thread, we've just release 1.3.7-unstable for a factory 2 setup for the Pico. This now contains 4 AU/VST instruments and 4 Midi output instruments. Is this what you're looking for?

Take care,

Geert
Eigenlabs Software Team

John said:

1.2 is a good release, decently stable and Windows 7 compatible. It's available right now. It might not have all the features that you want (what software ever does?)

Two things:
First thank you John for the answer on the beta test post, but I don't just think of the unstable releases, but also really unfinished stuff, that your sales force or your PR thinks are unimportant, because it doesn't have mass appeal. But on the other hand your early adopters are a kind of PR you cannot buy.
On the pay for software part. Apple has a stable software, on a stable OS and gives Xcode and the possibility to make new stuff for their platform for free (as does Microsoft with Visual Studio Express) with manuals and howtos and really good resources online. I bought the Pico and not the Alpha because I was not sure if the Software (which is proprietary) does what I want, which is giving me a responsive controller I can use anyhow I want. The 4 AU, 4 Midi preset is a step in the right direction, but it is unstable. If you start start charging me for the forum and new software releases at this moment, where there are no manuals, the release notes are cryptic, the Wiki is cobbled together and missing information, the software is unstable, I will just stop using the Pico and find something else. If you want people to pay, you have to have something they want to pay for. I am happy I didn't buy the Alpha, imagine buying such a expensive piece of equipment and then having to pay extra, to have a usable software. I would probably pay for telephone support (if I would ever use any) or an iPad control version, if it is reasonably priced. I would probably also pay for a nice Ebook, with in-depth information, I won't pay for software that makes my hardware usable in the way I was promised (there was talk of open source wasn't there or did I only dream that). You decided you have to go the we-do-everything-different route, not using MIDI or OSC, now you have to provide the software that makes your hardware more than a piece of plastic, with some electronic components, because the Eigenharp is actually not even a controller and without EigenD it is completely useless. My WiiFit board allows me more freedom.

I just want to add my agreement to this ---- I have still not received any contact from anyone at Eigenlabs to help me reconfigure my Alpha to do what I want, even though I was willing to pay (this was months ago). My alpha now sits unused and Eigenlabs looks like it's going in its own direction regardless of what many of its customers want and now we're supposed to pay extra going forward???

Two things:
First thank you John for the answer on the beta test post, but I don't just think of the unstable releases, but also really unfinished stuff, that your sales force or your PR thinks are unimportant, because it doesn't have mass appeal. But on the other hand your early adopters are a kind of PR you cannot buy.
On the pay for software part. Apple has a stable software, on a stable OS and gives Xcode and the possibility to make new stuff for their platform for free (as does Microsoft with Visual Studio Express) with manuals and howtos and really good resources online. I bought the Pico and not the Alpha because I was not sure if the Software (which is proprietary) does what I want, which is giving me a responsive controller I can use anyhow I want. The 4 AU, 4 Midi preset is a step in the right direction, but it is unstable. If you start start charging me for the forum and new software releases at this moment, where there are no manuals, the release notes are cryptic, the Wiki is cobbled together and missing information, the software is unstable, I will just stop using the Pico and find something else. If you want people to pay, you have to have something they want to pay for. I am happy I didn't buy the Alpha, imagine buying such a expensive piece of equipment and then having to pay extra, to have a usable software. I would probably pay for telephone support (if I would ever use any) or an iPad control version, if it is reasonably priced. I would probably also pay for a nice Ebook, with in-depth information, I won't pay for software that makes my hardware usable in the way I was promised (there was talk of open source wasn't there or did I only dream that). You decided you have to go the we-do-everything-different route, not using MIDI or OSC, now you have to provide the software that makes your hardware more than a piece of plastic, with some electronic components, because the Eigenharp is actually not even a controller and without EigenD it is completely useless. My WiiFit board allows me more freedom.

Hi David

Geert is right, the new MIDI and AU/VST control and routing matrix delivers what you were after. We didn't build you a specific setup as you asked because these features were not possible without additional code, which is as ever time consuming to get right, and we intended a more general solution (that was already had that in the queue and scheduled to be done in 1.3), as we now have. As far as I am aware it covers all the features that you asked for. Sorry for not telling you it was coming, but we're trying not to do that any more as it usually seems to bite us when things take longer than we wanted.

I'd love to hear your feedback about the new 1.3 unstable release and in particular the MIDI and AU/VST control aspect when you've had a go.

The remaining thing that you wanted, a setup without audio, is possible but I seriously doubt it will make that much difference to load time. When profiled, the lions share of the startup time is in other areas. We might (and please note that this is 'might' not a 'will') add a setup to the Alpha set similar to the new Pico one (just AU's and MIDI outs) but these are quite time consuming to produce and much more importantly they add a lot of testing and support time to each release as well as additional coding time for upgrade scripts, so we're reluctant to do so before the 2.0 series starts, especially as it won't add functionality, just speed the startup a little (which is nice, but personally I normally sleep my laptop so startup time has proven less a burden than I thought it might).

John

@dkah - I notice that you said that you thought the Pico 2 Factory Setup was broken or unstable in some way - we haven't had any problems with it here - could you send us a bug report when you experience a problem? It would help us to track down the issue for you and get it fixed before it gets into formal testing release.

John