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Thanks for taking the time to answer...couple of other questions about some things I'm still not clear about...
Will stage still be available in the base ver 2 version and will stage still be customisable without the pro version?
How are the plans going for the iOS version of stage?
Regards
Martyn

I understand the need for a sustainable income to continue development, and since hardware is constantly changing it does need constant bug tweaking, but I am understandably disappointed to hear that I will need to be paying a subscription simply to continue using an instrument I've already paid for to its full potential.

Support has been good so far, but unfortunately I seem to be having some strange isolated bugs that others have not, I've reported them all and so far most of what I've been hearing is that the problem is with my computer or USB cable (which is the stock cable) not with the software; but, in the words of Aza Raskin, I believe that "It's never the user's fault". I've had quite a few stability problems in 1.43 (and have reported them) and they still haven't been resolved.

Thank you for making this announcement so we have some time to think about it. I suppose I look at this too much like other instruments, those instruments (guitars with guitar strings, etc) require upkeep too, but it's not in that price range.
The Eigenharp still has a small community of users, as it grows then there will be more users to foot the overall cost, allowing it to be lowered, however I'm sure that starting with these prices will limit the amount of new users committing to the Eigenharp.

Thanks, I'm loving the instrument and will continue to love playing it, it's just a matter of cost to me, College isn't cheap and I'll soon barely be able to afford food, never mind software updates.

Thank you for your hard work

Hi Chris

I'll divide his reply into three parts if that's ok with you, mostly because I read that Aza Raskin link; it got me thinking and I'd like to chat about it.

Firstly though I'd just like to talk about your USB issues, which are rather more mundane but probably rather more pressing to you. I have to say that the USB interface of the Eigenharps has probably caused us more hassle as a company than any other piece of the hardware, and not for any reasons that we we created. USB is a veritable dogs breakfast of a protocol, remarkably so for something not that old, and has given hardware and operating system makers a lot of room to make mistakes. Sadly they seem to have taken these opportunities for error fairly frequently. On Mac systems the USB hardware is generally consistent, homogenous and reliable which unsurprising since its probably the same design team for the lot. The same cannot be said for PC's, where different vendors and motherboards create a wide variety of differing behaviours, some well outside of standard. We recently encountered a motherboard with no less that 3 different hardware USB devices on board, each from different vendors and each with its own software driver, and each of those with its own set of bugs. And that is before you add in on board hubs, which take an already complicated and buggy arena and add to it hugely. Now its is worth bearing in mid that the Eigenharps also give this hardware and software a hard time - we create both bulk transfer and iso pipes on the link and work it quite hard, so if there are bugs in the hardware or driver we're quite likely to flush them out, in a way that a CD or HD will not. And bugs we do find. Some we can code around (and the USB code inside EigenD get a little more complicated for this reason every year) but some are just broken and there is little we can do about that. No matter how often one might repeat the mantra 'its never the users fault', we simply can't fix that. So when we start suggesting that you change the USB cable, try a different port or piece of hardware (especially if we see operating system errors in the logs as Geert did in your case) please bear with us - at the point we can see no issues in EigenD and the OS is reporting hardware errors there truly is very little we can do - we're in the land of juju 'maybe it'll work if' attempts, just the same as you. Having said that our 1.0.8 USB driver is also a lot more paranoid, so it's really worth a try as it's possible that it just won't tickle whatever hardware error you are encountering. Please let us know how you get on. BTW, changing the USB cable often has useful effects - the USB cable spec is rubbish (the power transmission versus wire gauge is really marginal for voltage drop over length) and many vendors skimp - its the reason we ship a heavy gauge cable, but even these sometimes aren't enough if the source voltage on your PC is a bit low and out of spec, which once again isn't that uncommon on PC's.

On the annual cost of software front, I suspect that I'm going to be posting on this as a kind of pennance for the next ten years, but I would just like to point out some comparative costs for you (and everyone else). This year I have spent around £150 on guitar strings (10 sets of coated strings for my guitars) which is low this year as I haven't been playing as much as I usually do - 2-3 sets per guitar per year is normal for me and I've 5 different guitars to keep running. I've also had to spend £260 upgrading ProTools software (and this is software/hardware that I already own and paid a hell of a lot more for originally than anyone did for an Eigenharp) to gain precisely no new features that I want. I've had to pay $160 last week for my annual subscription to Waves just to keep an EQ an compressor that I like up to date (the Renaissance ones). $160 annually for an AU/VST EQ and a compressor! I've also just realised that I've probably got to upgrade Logic this year (£160) and that last year I had my 'Cello serviced which cost £600 and a valve guitar amp repaired which cost £200. The piano gets tuned ever couple of months (my wife's instrument though so cheating a bit there, I'm a terrible pianist) and that's £35 each time, or a couple of hundred pounds a year. In the context of this (and I know that I have a lot of nice tools for making music that I'm talking about here, but I'm far from a pro - this is not that unusual a maintenance burden) I am really struggling to see how keeping EigenD up to date (which is an expensive thing to make happen here) at £90/year is steep. Having just listed all that, its seems good value to me. Anyway, apologies, rant over...

The Aza Raskin link is a lot more interesting than all this stuff, thanks for including it. I read through their companies design philosophy and found it a very well expressed example of this point of view on UI design. It is the new current fashion, as can be seen in the crop of models of user interfaces such as IOS and Gnome. For some things I think it makes sense, but the insistence on this philosophy as ubiquitous is something that I disagree with fervently. I personally cannot stand the new Gnome for example, it seems to me to be a user interface for Teletubbies. There is a fundamental point here about the way the people interact with machines and the underlying assumption behind a lot of that thinking is that there exists a consistent model for this that can be applied for all types of interaction, whether the machine might be a telephone, microwave, word processor or perhaps a musical instrument. That model is very well expressed by Aza Raskin. I think it is wrong, and for many human activities very much so. If one owns a smartphone, or an ebook, they have a great point - these things are not creative tools, they are appliances. One does not want the prospect of unlimited new behaviours, in fact that prospect and the difficulty of encountering it is an anathema. But the moment that we encounter the world of creative tools, all that reasoning becomes bogus. As musicians or artists we seek the unexpected, the difficult, the expressive. The very 'keep it simple so the user is not needlessly challenged' approach it completely anti-ethical to this. The idea that as a user one is never wrong is too - if you can never be wrong you can never innovate either. The whole mindset delivers boredom. Now for my phone or my Kindle, I think this is a very good thing. For a musical instrument, or the computer desktop, no. I want power, possibility, control and the opportunity to screw up in the same way that I really don't want those things when I'm reading an ebook. That is at the heart of creativity, and allowing the mindset of UI designers like Aza Raskin to infect our world is like pouring cold water on the fire. Reading the design philosophy of their company 'Humanized' is like reading the inverse of what I want out of a computer that isn't an appliance. The only point I can agree with (and I agree with it wholeheartedly) is the last one, which is about discoverability and which I have come to regard as the primary thing I want in all software after reliability. But the rest of it, no thanks. Keep that stuff for my phone, my car and my book reader please.


John

Personally I think that £90/year for EigenD *is* pretty reasonable. But the reply just hit a nerve for me.

Just a small note, but I was quite shocked by John's reply, which basically reads like "I have to spend a lot of money on all of these things so charging you guys is justified". I know that you own a hotel and all, and who knows what else, but some of us mere mortals just don't have that kind of money, not to mention how long some of us would have saved up for the Eigenharp in the first place.

My apologies if this sounded harsh John, I'm sure this wasn't the intention but that is how it came across (another example of the internet changing the emotional tone perhaps).

I've refrained from replying here until I gave this matter some time and consideration.

I agree that this product requires a very high level of ongoing software development that is certainly above most other hardware devices.

We do all benefit from this, so I think it makes sense to figure out how to support it.

I do have a couple of reservations though. I think it's very important for the pico users to have a reasonable cost of entry without ongoing expense.

I also think that the freely available software needs to be updated to latest stable branch regardless of whether 1.4 or 2.0

Instead of saying 1.4 will stay free and everything 2.0 and above will be a subscription, it might be better to say, stable releases are free. If you want to be a PRO user and have access to that latest code base including all the incremental experimental and testing releases, you need to pay a subscription.

Free
Latest Stable software branch, currently 1.3x - Eventually 2.0 stable branch would also be free.
Free support and warranty for a year
Open source access to codebase of stable branch

Paid Tiers
Yearly extended support for email and phone support (You can always use Forum for free)
Extended warranty
PRO level subscription - access to experimental and testing branches of latest releases - Access to workbench
Developer Partner - Access to Source Code of testing and experimental releases - would have developer account on git hug or similar for this. Ability so sell products based on workbench etc like custom setups, new agents etc.

The Waves plugin example is actually not a good one. They have lost a lot of customers over it and market share. They are pidgeon holing themselves as a PRO-only product and they miss the mainstream market completely. This is my reservation on the subscription plan because you will never build out the user base if everyone feels like they need a subscription to use the product.

The open source release of EigenD is actually tracking the 2.0 branch at the moment, minus Stage and Workbench and a couple of new Agents. We were planning to have this continue, so there will always be a free alternative. It's not currently all packaged up nicely as no-one seems to want to do that (making releases is boring hard work I guess), but the option exists and its not like there aren't quite a few developers in the community who could do it.

As I said in the original announcement, we may well make a free version of 2.0 available next year, possibly with a read only, much cut down version of Stage that gives people a totally free option if they don't want to spend anything at all. This is going to cost time and effort to do though and while 1.4 is right there for free there's not exactly a lot of pressure to do this, its something that will become more relevant once 1.4 starts to show its age.

It's an interesting conundrum really - I also would like any owner to have the option of a free, lower functionality release but if many actually take that option, well, there won't be any releases at all as we won't be able to afford to do further development. In the absence of a supply of free money from somewhere I'm not sure how that problem ever gets solved. It will be interesting (and fairly crucial to the future of EigenD development) to see what kind of uptake there is for the subscription to Pro and base EigenD. In a few months things will be a lot clearer.

John

The current 2.0 open source release is imho not too interesting for end users. E.g. for Tau currently there is not even a matching default setup existing anymore atm. and most new non-under the hood features are apparently not contained. (Following a hint from Geert I applied his high resolution velocity changeset he wrote for 2.0 to 1.4 to be able to experiment with it, I can share the corresponding patch if there is interest of course - currently the only plugin I know of that supports this is Pianoteq though).
Open source 2.0 will be essential to write e.g. agents for EigenD 2 but as long as the infrastructure to build setups is not there I don't see a reason to start packaging up precompiled binaries - it wouldn't be of much aid, would it?

Like Barnone, I also give this topic some time and a good reflection, and initially was not shocked, but was hopping for a more creative "financial gymnastic" or different approach, maybe like this last post from NothanUmber , why not??

As an active Eigenharp forum user and player, by any means I'm againts paying for software development an adding new and fresh features/ideas or new physical instruments and effects.
The same is to say how to "reward" the early adopters onward? or should they be ? maybe they really were rewarded all this time since EigenD 1.0.
Bin able to participate and grow with it along....sugesting new features, that in the end, were pland or scratch by the very developing team?!?
Things change... and I belive in the good changes and old sayings - "you should not bite the hand that feeds you" (applies in both directions, i'm sure everyone agrees)

What's really bin missing till now? hard to say regarding every user has different backgrounds and
experinces, either musically with the instrument directly or with the software aspect.
Never put this in the open, but is it the ability to create a setup from scratch?? with so much on offer (Belcanto, STAGE)
and time to play, days would have to have like 30 hours long or something... is this a "trophy" that everyone wants to achieve?

In the end what matters most, I think, is the community that's building up, and the common good and growth.
(thumbs up for John's mention on ad hominem attacks)
Keep up the awesome work!!

keyman

Hi Chris

Sorry about you getting locked out - all that website code is being rewritten at the moment to provide support for subscriber areas and we just haven't got to that bit yet. Your question about forum access is answered in the first post in the thread, the announcement.

"Forum access will remain open to all registered players at the moment and will not require a subscription to post."

John

Yep, I got locked out too. Haven't been using the forum much but it was frustrating (and, yes to be honest, annoying) not to be able to download software to a new computer (which was when I realised I had been denied access). As a Pico and Alpha owner / user, I would have expected to at least get an email to warn me that this was about to happen and then only when I was actually able to do something about it (like get a subscription). However the company responded very fast and I am told my access will continue on a month by month basis until there is an alternative business model in place. My feeling is that this was a mistake rather than an intentional action (a bit like an automatic trading system).

My only other comment on the thread is that I am impressed with John's diligence in replacing his guitar strings (and on all his guitars!). There's a famous guitarist, I think it may be Leo Kottke, who replaces his strings very infrequently, getting used to the non-zingy, non-snappy (some one say dead) tone of old strings. That's my approach - though unfortunately any similarity ends there.

Nick