John Bowen wrote:We have had preliminary discussions with Psicraft Designs (creators of the Vyzor product line) to create an editor for Solaris. Here's what they've done for other synths so far:
http://www.vyzor.com/
I will copy your suggestions and send them along to the people at Psicraft. Once I can get them a prototype unit to start work on the Editor, they can take a look at all suggestions and see what they want to do.
-John B.
Hi John,
I have been a doing a lot of work in various things and what I am sharing in my response is really just food for thought ... I hope you will find some or all of it useful or as a possibility to consider:
1) Some kind of community enabling interface is more important today in an era of social networks, social engineering and of course, one of the largest collaborative art forms in the world: making music with others.
HTML and Javascript as well as things like AJAX can give you the web-based presence as well as the personal individual editor features : however, given what I know of the Soundquest product, it will take getting a browser component integrated into the VST Gui layer.
2) The second aspect of this kind of approach is networking and community-building. The power of enabling a community to share, to have those individuals that are maybe brilliant at sound design but hopeless as players is a way to connect people that complete and complement each other's skill bases: this can make your synthesizer very successful because through networking you can open the doors for the floodgates of the creative processes to provide inspiring sounds to the technologically great SOLARIS instrument. You might want to consider a Wiki like setup and think about the design elements of your VST Gui or Editor for SOLARIS from the point of view of being in an online network: Just HTML by itself is a powerful first step.
3) Sound Libraries: no matter how good a technology is, and yours is good, there is not a doubt in my mind: you will need to foster a vibrant sound culture --- this may quickly lead to major stars adopting it : a sound culture in my mind is a community of people designing sounds (and they might choose to give away some but sell other collections through your site). The users of the sounds, the instrument and the people making music (not always the same people, much like a lot of instrument designer s are not rock stars) can form a collaborative community just by itself where the attraction is itself the ease of participating and getting the value of just that special sound inspiration you were looking for. Technically, this means building in a network layer into your Gui (I recommend using a browser component) and setting up a basic server on your end. If you build in a Peer-2-Peer layer, then those folks, like the old Napster community, instead of sharing music, share sound designs if you do not want the upload/download bandwidth hassle (though now that's really a thing of the past).
4) GUI's are not what they used to be, just GUI's: now, a gui is a communications medium and it will define the character of your company and its positioning and image: it is very, very important --- for example, a GUI that makes basic keyword search available will save hours of wasted time which in a studio pay-for-play environment is absolutely critical. This is not hard to do, and some companies have this, like Native Instruments and Spectrasonics and Kyma : what they have not done is have an online searchable P2P service so you can get a much larger universe of sounds nor have they pushed the envelope on building communities of interest (*like designers of sounds versus players of sound) ... it is marching there but consider the human factors and technical elements needed.
5) I would also suggest for your consideration that we, as your early adopters, are here to help and that we might contribute more than at first glance may seem possible: a wonderful text by James Surowiecki called "The Wisdom Of Crowds" has been inspiring in several online and successful services --- you might even find that an online community of Coders/Programmers for your algorithms might promote your hardware platform in ways that you never dreamed of or with algorithms no one thought of ... that is another community of interest --- people who can write software for your platform: consider as a business model that providing the SDK for folks to write for SOLARIS may open up the open-source doors in ways that are unique and that may propel SOLARIS beyond what any single individual could achieve alone.
I hope these are useful as you consider your options for the GUI which will invariably impact your business model.
Cheers and thank you for the feedback on this issue.
-Arun
Solaris, Jomox Sunsyn,Modcan, Prophet-T8, Rhodes-Chroma, Pacarana,CS-80, Andromeda,M3,Nord-G2X,DK-Synergy
