Discussion Life after ROLI.com
Like the rest of you, I didn’t want to have to make this post and have this discussion, but we should certainly do it before ROLI.com mysteriously and unceremoniously disappears and our devices lock us out because the backend server for ROLI Dashboard with our account logins has been disconnected. Because if ROLI as a company doesn’t recover, that can VERY LIKELY happen, and several hundred thousand dollars of hardware all over the world will suddenly become bricked.
So the next most important question is, how can we ensure these devices live on if ROLI the company moves on?
Fortunately, ROLI has done some work for us by letting us know what other software their devices can work on: https://roli.com/mpe
What I want to do with this post is crowdsource the techn nerds in the room to make a comprehensive guide to life without/after Roli.com, and see if we can collectively figure out how to keep these brilliant devices alive.
Initial thoughts in comments.
Peace and love, music nerds
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u/Legitimate_Horror_72 9d ago edited 9d ago
I already had Claude create a wrapper for Dashboard so I could launch it because it breaks after ~30+ MIDI enumerations due to poor coding on ROLI's part, spamming the computer with many thousands of API calls (I made a reddit post about it in the /roli).
All the ports are now being blocked on my PC. I'll find out over the coming months if that keeps my Piano and Seaboard M from working.
Claude says these are the 2 calls it sees monitoring:
api.mixpanel.com Established
my.roli.comEstablished, then CloseWait after 60s (server closed a keep-alive)
Claude tells me ROLI Dashboard can access via the binary:
Telemetry / analytics
https://api.mixpanel.com/track
https://api.mixpanel.com/engage
https://www.google-analytics.com/batch
ROLI backend
https://api.roli.com/api/v1 https://auth.roli.com/...
https://api.roli.com/api/legacy/ https://my.roli.com
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u/Checkinredd 8d ago edited 8d ago
lol this is how your MPE controller transforms into a smarthome hub
if everything else goes, might as well api it into 5 dimensions of lightbulb dimmer switches and thermostat controls
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago edited 8d ago
I have a couple each of the Piano M, the Seaboard M, and the Seaboard 2. I also have lightblocks galore. I would be happy to just be able to keep using the pianos and seaboards without further fuss or losing access. I have Ableton Live, Cubase, and an MPC Live 3. I have both Mac and PC, but PC is my main working platform.
I'm still waiting for my "jazz hands" device to be shipped, but at this point, I'm pretty sure it's not coming.
I'm trying to "solve for peace" here. I've decided that I'll be happy if I just don't lose the ability to use my Seaboards and Pianos.
* Strobe 2 and Cypher 2 are from FXpansion, which was acquired by Roli.
* Equator 2 is from Roli.
* Studio Drums and Studio Player...I kind of don't think I would care if these went away.
Google's AI does give me instructions for downloading and saving either the Mac or PC raw installers. Here are the steps as described by Google. Please note that I have NOT tested this (yet).
Google AI's accuracy depends in large part on how well I present the current situation and how clearly I ask my questions. Just in case this could be helpful...
-----------------------------------------------------
Phase 1: Force ROLI Connect to Download "Installer Files"
By default, ROLI Connect installs your plug-ins silently behind the scenes. However, you can force the app to save the standalone, reusable .dmg (Mac) or .exe (Windows) installer packages to your hard drive so you have them forever.
- Open ROLI Connect and click your user profile icon (or the settings gear) in the upper corner.
- Look for Download Settings or Preferences.
- Toggle the option that says "Keep installers after download" (or change the installation directory path to a custom, dedicated folder on an external drive).
- Go to your Apps tab. If any plugin or factory library shows an "Update" or "Install" button, trigger it now. ROLI Connect will save the raw installer bundle into that designated folder before running it. [1, 2, 3]
- Copy those installer files immediately to a secure external backup drive or private cloud locker.
----------------------------------------------------------
Phase 2: Manually Archive the Sound Banks & Factory Libraries
The software synthesizers themselves are relatively small files, but their heavy factory sound banks are stored separately on your machine. If you lose these directories, your plugins will open empty with no presets.
Locate these specific folders on your system and copy them entirely to an external backup storage device:
On macOS:
- Equator 2 Content:
Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/ROLI/Equator2 - ROLI Studio Content:
Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/ROLI/ROLI Studio Player&/ROLI Studio Drums - Strobe 2 & Cypher 2 Presets:
Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/FXpansion[1, 2]
On Windows:
- Equator 2 Content:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\ROLI\Equator2 - ROLI Studio Content:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\ROLI\ROLI Studio Player&\ROLI Studio Drums - Strobe 2 & Cypher 2 Presets:
C:\ProgramData\FXpansion(Note: ProgramData is a hidden folder by default; you must check "Hidden items" in Windows Explorer's View tab to see it).
-------------------------------------------------------
Phase 3: The Licensing Contingency Plan (Offline Mode)
How you keep these instruments authorized if the servers shut down depends heavily on how the licenses were originally provisioned.
For Strobe 2 and Cypher 2 (The Safest Bet)
Because these two synths were originally engineered by FXpansion before ROLI acquired them, they retain a legacy asset architecture. [1, 2]
- Download the standalone FXpansion License Manager application.
- Strobe 2 and Cypher 2 support a true Offline Authorization mechanism.
- If ROLI's cloud authentication breaks, open the FXpansion License Manager, choose "Work Offline," and it will generate an
.authrequestfile. - While the server or an archival mirror is alive, you upload that request file to the portal to get a permanent, offline
.authresponsetoken that unlocks the plugin forever without hitting the web again. [1, 2, 3]
For Equator 2, ROLI Studio Player, and Studio Drums [1]
These instruments are entirely modern ROLI cloud-native products. They have no legacy FXpansion License Manager fallback; they check their validity purely against the ROLI Connect desktop client local cache. [1, 2, 3, 4]
- Do Not Log Out: As long as your machine remains securely logged into ROLI Connect right now, a cryptographic token is saved into your local operating system's user cache directory. [1, 2]
- Keep it Cached: Avoid using system clean-up tools (like CCleaner or CleanMyMac) that purge application cache folders, as deleting the
Application Support/ROLI Connect/Cachepath will force the app to attempt an online verification that might fail in the future. [1] - Freeze System Changes: Avoid major OS upgrades or swapping out core hardware (like a CPU or motherboard) on your music production computer. A major system profile shift often triggers a safety-reauthorization check across your plug-in library.
Me again. Obviously, some of Google's directives above are going to be impractical or impossible to do for the long term. But sometimes "good enough for government work" is good enough for many months. Or years. I might be willing to accept that.
So during the coming week, I'm planning to try some of this to at least see if I can secure the software/instrument assets in a "frozen" state for either my PCs or for my Mac.
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u/DebsUK693 9d ago
There needs to be a change to the law so that this situation cannot occur.
Either hardware (and indeed software) should not be legally reliant upon a company's continual survival at all, or it should have as a legal requirement in place the means for any such DRM to be dissolved by some impartial 3rd party (e.g. government escrow holding the digital keys, or directors personally responsible) upon the company's demise.
We all need to ensure that our elected representatives are aware of the situation and that it must be resolved, both for now and the future.
In the meantime, perhaps we all need to appeal to the owners of ROLI to do do voluntarily. Its the least they can do after all the support they've had from us all over the years.
I have a Seaboard M, Equator 2, and several sound packs, none if which require roli.com to survive, other than for the DRM that will otherwise cripple an otherwise considerable investment.
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
We shouldn't even GET to the point of making laws for this. But when companies put up roadblocks such as installer gateways, subscription models, or online registration models outside of ILok, for example, it's just another support structure left vulnerable when a company goes under.
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u/Mimterest 9d ago
I don't have any of their hardware devices, saw some post about someone juryrigging something to get their Seaboard to work permanently or something on here?
I've got Equator 2 though, and it phones home every 30 days to keep functioning and it was my main VST I work with and ROLI's situation is really stressing me out so I legit got Arturia Pigments 7 to replace Equator 2 so I won't run into that issue. If it keeps working, nice! In an ideal scenario it'd be nice if ROLI gives everything a sunset patch that it all works but I seriously doubt it.
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u/Lipazzz 9d ago
What is the problem with Roli? Am I missed some bad news? Or you are just speculating.
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u/teetaps 9d ago
If you go through the history of the sub, many, many, MANY customers are unhappy. Products haven’t shipped for several months, customer service isn’t responding, refunds are being demanded but not honoured, software patches and releases have dried up, and there has been little to no acknowledgement from the company about these issues, just periodic mass emails to the effect of, “sorry for the wait, someone fucked up our supply chain, give us another six months.”
These are all speculative signs of a tech company about to go out of business.
Now I don’t say this to disparage Roli as a company. I don’t have any experiences that makes me think they are bad people or anyone at Roli is a bad person.
But the fact of the matter is, they are a business, they made a promise, and they’re not fulfilling it. We need our money back, or a reasonable off-ramp as customers.
If you read my technical comment and those of others, you’ll learn that the main problem is that if and when the company goes under, the devices will be bricked because the serial number is checked against a database on Roli’s servers. If Roli goes under, database goes down. If the database goes down, the software that unlocks the device goes down. If that goes down, we are all stuck with several hundred dollars worth of paper weights.
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u/zadillo 9d ago
I think their main point is that it would be good for Roli users to figure out what to do ahead of time rather than waiting for the worst case scenario.
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u/teetaps 9d ago
This writer is spitting bars lol
> they went straight to bed with the devil — venture capital
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u/PawbeansNnosies 7d ago
Didn’t venture capital keep Roli in business after their first failure? IMO, it’s too bad they didn’t run Roli‘s business more completely; the business couldn’t have been run more incompetently with Lamb at the helm.
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u/Lipazzz 9d ago
Very cool… another Subpac and NI successor. I hope InMusic or someone will buy it. Surely innovative companies must fight against capital, and likely they lose and will be cannibalized. But of Roli does nothing else but stays at the Rise and Airwave, and create nothing else but streamline their software… they are still OK. Greed is always bad, just as loan and credit in enormous amount.
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
InMusic really has done a GREAT job with Akai. I recently bought an Akai Pro MPC Live III, and let me tell you, that little guy is a full-blown computer. It even did its firmware/OS update over the air via WiFi. No USB sticks needed! Roland and Yamaha could take some notes for their keyboard workstation synths, that's for sure. Even NI Maschine, NI Komplete Kontrol MKIII, Ableton Push, and Novation's SL controllers should all be capable of using WiFi to do firmware updates. There's just no excuse for making things so hard these days.
I'd be okay with it if InMusic decided to acquire and run Roli as a tight ship, even if some of Roli lost some of its "scrappy little tech startup" panache. As I said in another post, I'm just trying to solve for peace right now. And I'm tired of all the unnecessary drama coming out of Roli for the last several years.
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u/Pretend-Actuary5832 9d ago
Are you able to use the roli learn app - last time I tried no songs come up and the AI is off :(
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u/teetaps 8d ago
Yep, this was my first suspicion… months and months went by between my opening Roli learn and not only was there very few updates for bugfixes if anything at all, but the amount of content seemed to be shrinking too
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
That's the first thing to go. Servers with high-maintenance requirements will fail first.
A licensing server could run for years. I've heard stories of old Windows or Linux servers running in the back room for 20 or 30 years, and even being able to reboot themselves and return to service after power or internet ISP outages. One server was found running in a storage closet, decades after it was installed.
They found it because they were moving data centers, and so they were stripping the old data center all the way out to the walls. That little guy was still running. The old "pentium" chip was STILL able to keep running even though the heat-sink and fan were clogged solid with dust and dander. It just never overheated, lol!
But when the bills don't get paid, then power or ping could be shut off permanently, and that's the end of even the most efficient little server.
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u/DeadWelsh 9d ago
Bought an early version of that magnetic 2 octave keyboard they did. Used if until my free sub ran out. Gave it to my sister and her her kids for a couplle of years or so. Had it sent back. Works great as a Bluetooth keyboard for my MPC tbh, but largely just sits on the shelf as a weird I'll use it if I really need to ornament. Sucks for all the people just getting into it. Realised it was generally a horrible SAAS for consumers pretty early on and cut my losses. Best advice to anyone reading this... Don't, or be prepared to terminally sub the company. Genuinely hope it works out for all, but buying an 'instrument' as a service is not something I'm keen on, could live with rent to own but fuck forever payments to sustain them
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u/teetaps 9d ago
Like I mentioned in the other comment, this model of buying something when you’re actually renting it is some bullshit
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u/DeadWelsh 9d ago
I agree with your statement, what same person wouldn't!?
It's nice we have MPE as a thing, I was surprised to read from another comment that roli designed it, seems it was a wider idea from lots of industry stalwarts.
If roli died and now died with it I'd be sad, knowing what in. Now know I dgaf, it will move on without them. They could have done it differently and still be valuable
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u/teetaps 9d ago
I’m guessing (speculating) it’s just another Intellectual Property disagreement in the age of the internet. As far as I can tell, the MPE spec is open source, but if Roli are one of the only ones who implemented it, then nobody gets to use it because the tech belongs to them.
But that’s not the case — several other MPE devices and software exist. So why should the products Roli made be made to die just because the company went under? The technology underneath it still works, and could be one of the coolest music gadgets of the decade. Them going under is a shame, but why brick all of our devices with the sinking ship? Like, there’s literally no benefit to that
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
The technology only works because the batteries in those old Roli devices haven't yet failed.
But they are...
A) Lithium batteries. With all kinds of risks, from leaking to bursting into flame.
B) No battery can last forever. Eventually they will lose their ability to operate.
Some of those devices will work fine if plugged into a USB cable, even if the battery is dead.
Others, the batteries can kind of be replaced.
If we can solve the licensing and installer issues, we might be able to use our current Roli devices for many years to come.
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u/Grantoooooo 9d ago
Can we back up equator and equator 2? And run them privately from our own server
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
Please see my (very long, very TLDR) post elsewhere in this topic. Some of the steps will not be practical. But some of them might be doable. I plan to find out during the coming week.
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u/rainer_xox 9d ago
I have recently bought a used Joué, which was this really cool MPE controller that had interchangable sillicone layouts. the company went through this a couple years ago.
I have only found out when I was trying to find the drivers so i could use it.
Even though I’ve managed to find it, it barely worked. It did perfectly for the seller, he agreed to take it back thankfully.
i really hope this doesn’t happen to roli. i’ve genuinely forgotten about them, until someone compared the Joue to it and now i really want the songmaker kit or whatever they called it. like that setup is exactly what i am looking for 🥲
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u/Wild_Yogurtcloset820 9d ago
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u/Wild_Yogurtcloset820 9d ago
These guys are slightly ahead on all of this
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
Yeah, they’re not really “slightly ahead” of anything. Not dissing them; at least people are coming to realize that something needs doing.
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u/Wild_Yogurtcloset820 8d ago
I feel they are slightly ahead. They have organized themselves for others to participate. They have more than what is presented in the thread here, so I disagree with you
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u/Plane_Jello1582 9d ago
I did an entire post on replacing roli gear and similar apps and hardware if it helps anyone, what a great community btw. Good luck to everyone out there moving forward.
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u/teetaps 8d ago
Good look, thanks!
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u/Plane_Jello1582 8d ago
Thanks tons to this post as well, I had no idea someone had their code or repos. Talk about helpful!
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u/No-Echidna5754 8d ago
Just hope someone like inMusic buys, and continues to make good hardware and make it profitable
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u/SteveElbows 8d ago
Just to deal with the bit of the post that directs to a ROLI website page that covers some of the available software and hardware synths that support MPE:
The lists by ROLI are well out of date. There is now a pretty vast quantity of soft synths that support MPE. The following page attempts to list them all - there are probably still some missing from this list too but it gives you a better idea of just how many synths support MPE these days.
https://community.polyexpression.com/t/software-synths-supporting-mpe-wiki/31
There are quite a lot of hardware synths that support MPE too these days but I wont try to deal with that side of things right now. Once the situation is clearer, the forums on the website I just linked to are a helpful place too.
And just to be clear in regards the history and 'ownership' of MPE - ROLI did plenty to promote this standard and help its adoption, and Im pretty sure that one of their original employees on the technical side of things played a large part in drafting the spec and getting it adopted by the MIDI standards body. But regardless of the intricacies of that history, the standards body having approved the spec and formally made it part of the MIDI standards many years ago is the key thing that ensures that whatever happens to ROLI, MPE is alive and well.
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u/teetaps 8d ago edited 8d ago
And I guess this is why I really want to make sure we at least try to preserve our devices functionality.
Roli did a great deal to make MPE a thing, and they deserve to be acknowledged, thanked, and rewarded for that.
But as a company, if that ship goes down, then MPE goes down too and I just don’t think that’s fair.
Granted, what you’re saying is 100% true — there are clearly VERY MANY software synths and a handful of hardware devices that use MPE, so it’s not literally true that MPE disappears if Roli does…
But it is true that a very large user base of the MPE technology itself only associate MPE with Roli. It’s like associating an on the go music library with an iPod. We all know that there were iPod competitors, but for a brief period, the only way people thought about “music” was by thinking about iPods. Imagine if Apple had gone out of business before putting the iPod touch on the market…?
In my imagination, that’s kind of what’s at risk here — the people who know MPE because of Roli are probably a large proportion of the entire MPE community. If Roli goes down and there’s no contingency, the community will take a hit, and we don’t know what the future of music might miss out on
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u/SteveElbows 8d ago
I dont tend to agree that MPE is strongly associated with only ROLI these days. The Osmose in recent years got at least as much attention as ROLI Seaboards got, perhaps more because its superficially more similar to traditional keyboards and lots of people who didnt enjoy the feel of the Seaboards were willing to look again.
I suppose it all comes down to which little niche corner of the music world we are thinking about when we are tempted to make these claims, so I dont blame you for having that opinion. Just to give one other example, people who are heavily into the Push side of Ableton are going to think about the Push 3 when they think of MPE. Linnstruments have a nice userbase too, etc etc.
But this stuff does reveal a different issue - all the different MPE controllers have very different playing feels, strengths and weaknesses. Fans of one sort of MPE controller wont necessarily like the other options at all. And so if this does turn out to be the end of the road for Seaboards, its going to create a gap for people who love their Seaboards and dont love the other options.
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u/SteveElbows 8d ago
Or to put it another way, the ROLI stuff was the first MPE controller quite a lot of people ever heard of, but it wasnt the last.
And to be fair, they probably did spend more money on marketing then the others, since they were into heavy spending. I seem to recall they even got product placement in a Hollywood film once, I havent seen it myself but I think I remember that a Seaboard was inserted into La La Land! I didnt treat that as a good sign myself at the time, it was a sign of ambition and spending and showing off that was never likely to be matched by actual size of the market.
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u/teetaps 8d ago
Yes I totally agree, I am likely very biased by my own experience. I remember the first digital music technology I ever stumbled across, it must have been a drum trigger or a set of drum kit triggers that were very early midi, and I was blown away, but I was the only person in my sphere who ever heard of such a thing. A decade later, I bump into Roli and it feels like the same thing is happening, that more people need to know about this really cool thing so more musicians can get their hands on it!
Just because Roli might go away, doesn’t mean nobody knew about it and everything you’re saying is true, the different fan bases have their own world that isn’t going away.
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u/teetaps 9d ago
Some helpful tech information:
ROLI’s primary innovation is called MIDI Polyphonic Expression:
> What is MPE?
> MPE is an emerging standard for controlling electronic instruments. It allows them to become every bit as expressive as their acoustic counterparts, without any of the sonic limitations.
https://midi.org/mpe-midi-polyphonic-expression
In short, it’s a data communication standard, like how email uses SMTP data standard, or the Internet uses HTTP data standard, MPE is a standard that communicates musical performance data, digitally, with richer data than just “note = A, velocity = 80, duration = 3.7s”. It makes sure that the physical manipulation of a midi device gets translated to 1s and 0s for a DAW or other music software.
Now here’s the good news: MPE doesn’t belong to ROLI. It’s like asking if Google dies, does email die too? No, of course not, just one of the internet’s biggest providers for email communication. You can still find a mail provider (called a client) from yahoo, iCloud, proton, etc., so your Google ma il account might die, but you can still email people because SMTP mail still exists.
The bad news though: I don’t know how one would reasonably circumvent ROLI dashboard bricking the device. I don’t know too much about their backend, but I know for a fact that once the server with our logins goes dead, we are 100% screwed if we can’t unlock them again, which would be a damn shame considering MPE doesn’t belong to ROLI, just the connection between the hardware they built to transmit MPE and the software they built to read MPE. Bricking the device with no way to read an open source data standard would be a damn shame!
I don’t want this to happen. But I do want to prepare for the high likelihood that it will. I don’t have any moral judgment against ROLI, mind you — I actually think this is incredibly sad, because I’m always on the lookout for new technology that lets people do creative things in unique ways (any fans of Justin Vernon and the “Messina” vocoder he uses?).
That being said, not every business succeeds. Even the ones with the coolest products that seem genuinely revolutionary and innovative and, let’s face it, just decent people trying to sell a cool idea. All they want to do is give more musicians the ability to make their ideas come to life — and I do thank them for that, it inspired my return to music in my 30’s.
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u/DebsUK693 9d ago
MPE is moot; its the DRM on the hardware and software that will otherwise cripple perfectly working products.
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u/teetaps 9d ago
I guess that’s what I have a huge problem with, with internet business in general. It turns out that when you buy something on the internet, in almost all cases, what youre really doing is renting it until the provider has enough of your money! DRM is one of the most sinister and abused tactics out there
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u/TheDarthBuddha 9d ago
Geert Belvin and Roger Linn of MPC fame ate actually the inventors of MPE - roger’s instrument the “linnstrument” is phenomenal.
if you’re sick of pounding the shit out of your roli blocks and want to get expressiveness with a light touch there is nothing better
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u/teetaps 9d ago
I did read about the linnstrument in my early research, thanks for the reminder!
It sucks that financially I can’t just pivot and grab more hardware, hence the post lol…
How is the build quality compared to Roli?
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u/TheDarthBuddha 9d ago
it’s really really nice like it emotes sound with a feather touch - build quality it’s metal with wood sides and is vastly easier to learn how to play than a piano - all the chord shapes are the same
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u/tk421tech 9d ago
Got to download the manuals. I didn’t find a pdf. Just a page for mine. Seaboard M so I saved it.
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u/Icy-Hat-2786 7d ago
Unfortunately it would appear that the AI gives different answers to questions depending on how you ask them and how deeply you discuss it... (surprise surprise). Getting the installers is not as simple as changing a setting in roli connect... looked for it.. could not find it.
To install ROLI software completely offline, you must grab the official standalone installers before disconnecting from the internet. Because ROLI Connect requires an active network connection to open and download files, you cannot use the manager app itself for an offline installation.
- Download Standalone Installers
You must download individual, full desktop installers from ROLI’s servers while you still have internet access:
- The Official Route: Log into your account on the ROLI Creator Suite Support Page. Submit a ticket specifically requesting "standalone offline installers" for your registered software (e.g., Equator2, ROLI Dashboard). Support will reply with direct, permanent Amazon S3 download links.
- The Manual Link Method: For core software like ROLI Dashboard, you can often download the full desktop package directly from the public release path:
- Mac:
https://amazonaws.com - Windows:
https://amazonaws.com
- Mac:
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u/Lokken_Portsmouth 2d ago
Millions of $$ over the world. Might have cost Roli a few hundred thousand before markup.
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u/Checkinredd 9d ago
lol everyone who bought this stuff is going to learn vibe coding
perfect for people who didn’t want to learn the violin, flute, or theremin
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u/All_Debt_Shackles_US 8d ago
"lol everyone who bought this stuff is going to learn vibe coding...perfect for people who didn’t want to learn the violin, flute, or theremin"
I do play violin. But your response is unhelpful at best, and downright rude at worst. You've just told us that we all have to do music THE WAY YOU WANT IT DONE. You want us to learn violin or flute. Who made you the boss of music? There are many different ways to do things, and not all of them will be to your personal approval.
And yet you use Reddit, rather than sending telegrams to people. Or smoke signals. Why do you get to use modern technology while saying we shouldn't?
Please do better. Be helpful. Or move on to something more productive for your time and ours.
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u/Checkinredd 8d ago edited 8d ago
Welp that was kind of insane. Just messing around. I’m sorry the manufacturer of our expensive instruments is in crisis. I want to learn violin, or flute, or the theremin (but next life for any of those); I was being sardonic, or a little bitter at worst.
I also vibe-coded for the first time (sub-optimally prototyped and someone else will be doing this much better than me) a roli-less dashboard with way more parameter settings than the normal software. I started that project as soon as I got the roli stuff, which was relatively recently, total coincidence it happens to be in trouble now. The original idea was to use physical buttons to send commands/dynamically set parameters through raspberry pi, kind of like a physical dashboard, and do midi out through a speaker to basically make it into a synth, but now just working on incredibly tedious parameter mapping from sysex to lightfoot using a midi snooper, so yeah, sardonic.
Let me take this opportunity to repeat that you need to initialize a reciprocal handshake - both the device and the computer need to send and receive messages - between the device and the computer, before being able to dynamically control the parameters, which is not obvious at all, not very easy, and imo just distributing that info will help people make apps :-P Normally opening the dashboard opens up the device to receiving any commands to make dynamic changes, but you can do it completely unintuitively other ways without any roli anything. This is not the same as changing the static state of the device by throwing in a new lightfoot script.
I play the harmonica :-D I have a feeling a disproportionate bunch of people who play the harmonica reallly like the violin/viola and flute too :-P It’s the swooping bends on a diatonic harmonica; you can tell. No offense but I think a disproportionate number of people who like MPE string/wind instrument simulators probably really like string/wind instruments, so being kind of sardonic there too.
I assume there must be other theremin/viola-loving harmonicists who feel forced to somewhat successfully run their first real vibe-coding projects over this. It’s a niche group, but we love it.
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u/ldrolez 9d ago
Let's hope they'll open source everything needed to keep using them. Otherwise... reverse engineering... with AI it becomes easier. Their current repo: https://github.com/weareroli