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Ive asked for this sort of thing a couple of times, I think we need to wait for Workbench to come out to make this sort of thing possible for us to do ourselves.

Hey guys,

I don't think you'll have to wait for the Workbench for this. If I recall correctly, Dave has mentioned that he'll cover this in one of the next seminars, so you'd be able to customize this yourself with Belcanto as you see fit.

@samharoth, It's true that there have been some delays, the main reason being that we decided to do things properly based on user demands and re-architect a lot of the EigenD internals with the future in mind. This has taken quite a while and John has been very open about it. You'll see a lot happen at an accelerated pace now, the proof being that only a few weeks after the stable 1.1 release, there's now a stable 1.2 release with Windows support and an unstable 1.3 release with Stage. So yes, there has been a backlog, but it's in the process of being absorbed quite quickly now. The free seminars with user questions should help you do more advanced things with Belcanto in the meantime. Also, feel free to email customer services directly if you have a specific question, we'll do our best to help you out.

Take care,

Geert
Eigenlabs Software Team

Hi John (& Geert,)
Thanks for the comprehensive response to my concerns. Apologies if it seemed like I was ranting, but behind my moaning I hope there's a constructive point. I know that there is a constant tension between claiming too much too soon and never saying anything and therefore losing consumer interest, but my main criticisms stem more from frustration than anger. I've been lusting after an Alpha since your very first demos, so you need to see it from the other perspective as well; originally (and forgive that I can't remember exact dates here) it was clearly stated that EigenD was Mac only, however, this soon changed to 'Windows release shortly' or words to that effect. I was all set to buy an Alpha as soon as the Windows release was available, even selling my trusty Selmer sax to cover most of the cost. Unfortunately then the Windows release was delayed further and when an unstable version was let into the wild this was for Pico support only (as even the new stable release is) - something which until that point had never been mooted as far as I'm aware. Sensing that it was going to be a while I ended up buying a Pico, which I love. Six months down the line, having still seen no sign of either Alpha support or a stable release, I spent some of the cash on a Macbook Pro. I don't regret this in the slightest and, having always been a staunch Windows user, I'm now a complete convert. It's also truly freed up the Pico so that I'm not worrying about software (subject to my original question), but rather just technique. The negative from your side of the equation is that, ironically now I've got the computer to support an Alpha I can no longer afford to buy one for a while longer; the positive side is that my experiences with the Pico have only cemented my conviction that an Alpha is something I want to dedicate time to learning.

Ultimately, as the dad of two young girls and a wife who's given up work to look after them it'd be a huge gamble for me to commit nearly two months wages to an Alpha at the moment, so you have to appreciate how it's not just delivering great hardware (which I genuinely believe you have) that counts to your success, but also walking that tightrope between managing expectations whilst still keeping the devoted interested. Unfortunately in the time I've been waiting, the option prices have crept up, so now I'm looking even further down the line. The fact that I'm toying semi-seriously with releasing some equity when my mortgage tie-in ends in December means you must be doing something right though and I really hope that you succeed.

This bit's slightly off-topic, but I think you've talked previously about how you're being confounded in your aims to open-source things due to your need to keep your intellectual property secure. As a partial solution to this could you not release some kind of device driver kind of interface, whereby you could give programatic control via a 'black box'? If you could find a way to expose a fairly raw input/output interface then this in itself may take some of the pressure off, since I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there that would start delivering new apps for you. If you look at the likes of the Monome, it's that lack of contraint that has made the device so popular, and some of the most interesting devices have been written by 'entusiastic amateurs'.

Thanks again for your replies, and I hope you realise that my complaints are based around a genuine desire to see you all succeed.

Cheers,
Mark.

P.S. Keep away from the cocaine idea - it would appear that we're both too wordy already, without any chemical motivation. ;-)

Thanks mate. I'll have a look around for it when I get five minutes. I did wonder about using Plogue Bidule for something similar, but I understand that I'd have to pay for that. A freebie would be ideal, especially if it were just a short-term solution until it can be done natively.

Well that would just mean restricting access to 'Unstable' (which as you may have noticed we try to release early and often on), which seems a little hostile to me. We may end up doing that as our user community grows, but it is nice to be as open as possible while we can, and it's a lot less administration to just keep it voluntary. We do sometimes have a branch running that is not released externally and is restricted (like the current forthcoming iPhone app or the 2.0.X branch now running) but we do try to avoid this as much as possible, its nice to share.

John

Thank you, John

The openness is appreciated and it is interesting to hear everyone's experiences.

m

Hi Nick

Most users truly aren't that interested in what Workbench offers. They will be greaty interested in the results of what other people can do with it I think, but they don't want to get involved in that level of technical detail. Talking about listening to our customers, this is what I hear when I talk to them (which I do quite a lot). It's less in what they ask for, its more in how they want it delivered, and smart tools to enable a rich configuration environment are not on the desired menu. They just want setups that do exactly what they want, but they don't want to have to understand how it works, what it does or anything really. Many of them don't have much of a grasp of MIDI, and aren't even that interested. As I've said before, I have sympathy with this view, even though I don't share it entirely. People genuinely want instruments more like a guitar and less like a modular Moog, though they want the sound of the Moog, they don't want the headache of figuring out how to connect it up.

There are a small group who are very, very interested in Workbench (ah, and how many of you would love to own a big Moog Modular I wonder?) as they wish to customise and adapt the instruments and EigenD, usually quite extensively. This group includes pretty much all the people really active here (and many of you are programmers in another life, so it's no big surprise), all the players at Eigenlabs and myself. Workbench is going to be very cool for them (us) and since that includes the dev team and myself, you shouldn't worry about its prospects, it is progressing well. But if we are talking about market driven, the market (particularly the broader market) doesn't really care, however much this might disappoint me, and I suspect you..

What I do think (and hope) will happen is that Workbench will begin a sharing of cool setups on the Wiki and forum, so that those who don't want to grapple with the complexities of notes, events, signals etc can benefit from others who do. This was my original dream for the Eigenharps, that the flexibility would enable a category of player to evolve who would blaze the way in creating fantastic playing environments. We didn't get the tools right to start with to make this work, but we are now very close to having them. I think we're going to have fun with them.

On a different note, Geert has a really nice MIDI routing matrix going into the 1.3 series shortly, for both AU/VST and MIDI ports. I think that this will allay many of the MIDI data concerns here, it provides a great deal of flexibility about what data goes where.

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. In the same way that keyboards and guitars do fit into a studio, we want the Eigenharp to fit well too, so increasing levels of interoperability is important to us and will be happening steadily as time goes on, mainly I suspect through OSC. But it is not the main driver and has never been (and I don't think that we have ever indicated that it was), our main focus is getting them out on stage, and providing musicians with the tools to make this better. In order to do this well we are forced into repeating a surprising number of features already present in other software, as those features are often MIDI centric, can't cope with the data rates or require fairly demanding setups (in the technical sense) that a lot of musicians just aren't interested in.


John

Charging for participating in support forums and downloading updates to software? (I can understand the necessity for periodic upgrade fees (for major upgrades) when software is stable, fully functional and upgrades are not absolutely necessary to performance.)

But charging for participating in support forums? All current Eigenharp owners are alpha and beta testers for the company. So, why consider charging any of us? Reminds me of the recent reply about my concern for lack of documentation. The company would rather charge buyers for tutorials than provide the classic type of documentation provided by every significant software provider.

Additionally, the assumptions about what the average player wants out of the Eigenharp seem out of step with what many are requesting. Why not develop the hardware and software, provide appropriate resources and documentation and let the user base determine how they want to use the instrument?

These is not the marks of a friendly, sustainable company. They are mistakes shared by hundreds of new companies that have failed before they could develop a user base large enough to sustain them.

I hope Eigenlabs reconsiders the path it's on.

I dont mind paying for iOS version of Stage at all.

I wouldnt mind paying for support, but I dont really count the forum as being the premium support channel, especially when a proportion of my posts here are trying to help other people.

I have mixed feelings about the charging for software in future. I dont think its a model people tend to expect when buying hardware in this day and age. And I dont think its the model hardware companies use to keep their business viable either, surely making the software better is an ongoing thing that is supposed to make your product sell better as time goes on. Maybe this plan will work ok at some point, but I think the fact the timescale for workbench availability slipped makes it a bit of a dangerous decision at this stage of the game. This really doesnt feel like the sort of thing Id expect to happen in 2010, and reduces your overall chances of success as far as Im concerned. Im well aware that I only bought your cheapest instrument but my word, if I had purchased an Alpha then I think I would be quite upset indeed that the thousands were not considered enough to provide ongoing support & evolution of the product without many further charges. I imagine that lots of these problems are due to the issue of scale, customers have grown use to a mass-produced world where stuff is cheap, and you are operating in something of a niche at present. I want you to succeed, I would not want you to listen to me if it robbed you of income necessary to prosper, but at the same time I am extremely concerned that you may be making decisions which dont help your prospects.

When I ordered the Pico I hoped that I may get on with it so well that I could go around the net making lots of happy and positive noise about it. Various things, some small and some larger, have scuppered my ability to evangelise this stuff. I've been waiting for the day that changes and I can be positive, now I am concerned that day will not come and I may as well just sell my Pico and move on.

Hi Steve

We haven't yet decided what our ongoing support levels and charges are going to be (or even if the forums will be open or closed to people who have bought support, so everyone please calm down about that, its likely it'll be some kind of mix), so your input is useful thanks.

You are quite correct that many people have become used to hardware being accompanied by free software, but if you look around you will find quite a rich mixture of revenue models. Apple are perhaps the best example, they make high volume, high quality products with a big software component, the core of which they give away with the hardware. It's important to note though that they do charge for many major system upgrades, which they generally make every year or so, and they also charge (highly in my opinion) for ongoing support beyond what is often a short initial period. They also have a lot of value add applications that they sell on the basic platform, all of which have often quite substantial maintenance costs beyond the first year.

They also make hardware that is quite frankly soon obsolete. This is part of their business model, and since they sell you a new phone every 2-3 years, they get recurring revenue from you. I would dearly hope that someone with an Alpha will still be playing it in ten years, it is not a piece of consumer stuff, its a musical instrument, but that means if I don't charge you for support I might never see any more revenue from you, even though you incur costs with us every year.

We are not in the position Apple occupy, either from the maturity of software point of view or volume of manufacture point of view, but it does not seem unreasonable to be charging for ongoing upgrades beyond an initial year, particularly if we can keep those costs sensible. as part of an overall revenue mix. If the price of our instruments has to cover all ongoing support and software development for all our customers they will have to get substantially more expensive in the future. I don't think this is fair to potential new players, or sane from a commercial point of view.

As you may be aware, I am not the only investor in Eigenlabs, and I have also to justify the very substantial ongoing cost of software development and what it means to the company to my fellow shareholders. It is very hard to do so if it is all free, even more so in the light of me wanting to GPL the core system. From a forward planning point of view we need to see ongoing revenue from our customers, however small it might be, in order to justify substantial continued investment in developing the software beyond what is needed to simply sell instruments. This is not an unusual model for any business (and I have started, grown and sold a number of software businesses in the past with a fair degree of success, it's not exactly foreign territory to me) and I am unclear really as to why anyone thinks that we're might be either unfriendly or lacking in openness (sorry carvingCode, that sounds a bit snippy and I don't mean it that way - I do understand what you mean, I just don't think that it makes us unpleasant or commercially in error) by charging for things that cost money.

John