
Synth Collection heading for iPhone and iPad - l8rlump
http://raspberrypisynthesizer.blogspot.com/2016/07/synth-collection-heading-for-iphone-and.html
======
llamataboot
The bitter tone of this guy's post bothers me. I get it, you think you built
something amazing for the raspberry pi. And maybe you did? But I don't know
because I can't see it.

I wrote this person multiple times since they posted this /a year ago/

\--

Drop me a line if you are interested Interested meaning, commercially
interested -

a) interested in licensing 3 amazing-sounding, ultra-efficient soft synth
engines, destruction tested on a Raspberry Pi model 1

\--

Never heard anything about a price point. Never saw a release for money. Never
saw a preview of the synths (other than a tiny one). Never heard anything
about the possibility of open-sourcing it (so therefore not maintaining it
himself) etc.

\--

This just seems like so many sour grapes. I mean, maybe the synths stink and
that's why no one wants to buy them. Maybe not. But how would anyone know when
he refers to interested people as "tyre kickers" and never releases a price or
donation model for the software??

\--

In the meantime, Sonic Pi is turning into a pretty damn capable music package
for the Pi. (And Processing runs on the Pi now as well). It's gone from what I
would consider a tool that uses music and the instantaneous feedback loop of
creating sounds to teach coding to being a full fledged piece of music
software with a lot of capability. If it can go headless soon and output/input
midi it will be even more fantastic. I'm happy to support it on Patreon.

[https://www.patreon.com/samaaron](https://www.patreon.com/samaaron)

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diydsp
Instrument/synth designer here.

There are many possibilities for Phil. He really has to think in terms of
musician value, not the software artifact.

My first suggestion is to sell a playable instrument, e.g. to bundle a
controller with a pre-installed RPi. The real market is for something a
musician can switch on and play. Musicians want a box you can open, turn on,
press buttons and hear sound. No logins, configuration, compilation, boot-up,
login, installation. Make sure you have the right jacks (MIDI, 1/4" audio
output, 3.5mm headphone). Notice all this hardware is difficult to pirate.
Musicians only have limited time to pirate and a surprising number of them
actually pay for software after pirating it for a while. They are mainly
motivated by reliability, getting the newest thing (piracy has some lag
associated with it) and _resale value_ (pirated stuff can't be re-sold) and to
some extent social embarrassment. Basically, if they're making money from your
software, they're more likely to pay you.

I have found the overlap between programmers and musicians to be a thin-ass
Venn diagram. You can't sell possibilities or flexibility (only expandability,
but that's a low priority). You have to sell playability. Most musicians will
take chances on something new, but they don't want to invest a ton of time in
it. They'll see what it does NOW, not in the future and introduce it as an
accompaniment to an existing track. As they build a relationship with it,
they'll rely on it more and more.

My suggestion to Phil is to put together a small run of about 10 immediately-
playable systems and sell them. Stay close to the people you sell to,
encouraging them to use it and listening to them. Use their feedback to
iterate. Standard startup stuff.

You'll have some pirates, but those will mostly be people who are _good at the
Raspberry Pi_ , not people like my uncle, who can turn on a laptop, but find
computers tedious and prefer to spend their energy strumming, knob-twiddling,
looking for people to rehearse with, etc. In fact, your pirates will help
spread the word to musician friends.

After that part is covered, you can get into the marvelous flexibility of
software synthesis! But again, make it easy for musicians. You won't want them
to have to learn a new skill, such as RPi, just to use your synthesizers!!!

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shams93
The thing you want to do with the pi is turn it into a euro rack hardware
digital synth,
[http://www.csounds.com/journal/issue18/eurorack.html](http://www.csounds.com/journal/issue18/eurorack.html)

~~~
jerrysievert
i've been reading up quite a bit on this, and slowly figuring out how to best
sample c/v and gates - i've purposely left room in my skiff to build one.

the article linked is missing one of the diagrams, but if you check the image
url's, you can find it.

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squeaky-clean
I'm not really sure what the complaint is here. Someone is so afraid of losing
of sales to piracy, that they refuse to sell the product at all? Genius! Now
piracy is is cutting into 0% of your profits! People sold software long before
there were walled-garden app stores, and even then app stores don't really
prevent piracy if someone is determined. Why not just sell a binary on your
website? That's how I've purchased all my other soft-synths.

> Which of course, in a totally bizarre move, kills stone dead the entire
> software industry and the future careers that the platform is intended to
> nurture - it's supposed to teach kids how to code, because software
> development is hard, and by learning this hard skill these kids will have a
> meaningful career. But in a world where software has zero value - literally
> zero, because in Pi world everything is free, and is supposed to be free,
> and any attempt to make stuff not be free will not get support - what value
> does that place on the people who develop software?

"How are these kids supposed to learn how to code if I can't sell them my
closed sourced software?"

I'm not opposed selling commercial/proprietary software, but how do you delude
yourself that doing so is assisting open-source and education? Also what do
they mean by "will not get support"? Who should provide this support? Google
or Apple don't support buggy apps. They don't push bugfixes when Tinder is
broken. The best you can get is a refund for a paid app within a very small
time window.

> The choices are give it away for free, and support it indefinitely into the
> future for free, or don't release it at all on the Pi.

What? You could give it away for free and abandon it, or let others
maintain/support it. You can sell it and support it. You can sell it and not
support it. You can preload a binary onto a Raspberry Pi and only sell it as a
hardware unit. It's also likely not specific to the Pi (since they're porting
it to iOS), you could likely compile and sell it for any Linux system, or even
other ARM boards that compete with the Pi. Sonic Pi isn't exclusive to the Pi,
it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (ARM and x86/x64).

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manicdee
Red Hat and Canonical seem to be doing okay in the "selling free software"
market.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Probably because they sell mostly to businesses. The Raspberry Pi seems to be
targeted to schools and hobbyists; neither of those groups spends a lot of
money on software (certainly not compared to businesses).

~~~
squeaky-clean
> The Raspberry Pi seems to be targeted to schools and hobbyists; neither of
> those groups spends a lot of money on software (certainly not compared to
> businesses).

Well then, that sounds like a dumb business decision by the author. Who spends
4 years working on something they only intend on selling, without ever
checking if their market wants to buy it?

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paulryanrogers
"Without developing a full-blown sandboxed App Store... there is no way for a
pure software play to make money."

Defaults can set powerful expectations. A freemium model could work if the
market were a bit more willing to pay for software.

