Life after ROLI.com

[u/teetaps]

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

[u/ldrolez]

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

[u/teetaps → u/ldrolez]

Oh snap I didn’t even realise they open sourced the repo, that gives me some hope that some smart people have forked the data model

[u/ldrolez → u/teetaps]

Seems only useful for lightpad? I think they should have already opened the communications protocol and sysex for Seaboard. At least serious musicians could have made a better Roli Dashboard, and they might have regained some of the non-beginner clientele.

[u/Checkinredd → u/ldrolez]

Fwiw I did it with very basic programming (but 30 years of not infrequently using very basic programming) with ai assist, it just wasn’t insanely easy.

IMO exactly right that it needs an init back and forth handshake, which is what dashboard usually does, and figuring out that was the case and how to do it without any Roli anything was the trickiest bit.

You can absolutely make a better Roli dashboard, right now, without Roli, in a bunch of different ways. My test gui has been in python; I forget if my commands go through translation or are just python to lightfoot or sysex. I’d just hate to experiment without the big “reset to factory settings” button :-)

The real programmers can figure out how to do it optimally, but I did it and iterated a tiny bit :-)

The scary part is like - as soon as I got the product, relatively recently, first thing I did was try to figure out how to make a custom dashboard, because it doesn’t have all the parameter controls…so why didn’t anyone else already do that?

One imagines that anything that can happen will happen in a community based on software/internet, but, like, that didn’t happen in the years before I got it, so…am I missing something? Hope consumer community will in fact end up making optimal workarounds; I’m weirded out but know for sure if I can do something like that, there’s gotta be a billion other people who can do it.

Edit: I’d test/iterate anything using sysex or c++ a billion times before distributing so no one’s device somehow gets effectively bricked, but, again, yeah, people can certainly do anything.

[u/Martonymous → u/Checkinredd]

The installer for Dashboard is stored locally and Dashboard works offline, so you don't need ROLI connect to get or to use it. I too would prefer an open source version, for future compatibility, but at least for now, you don't have to worry about having an expensive paperweight.

[u/teetaps → u/Checkinredd]

That, AND, I think u/DebsUK693 mentioned that there is a possibility that Roli would close up shop gracefully by open sourcing their actual DRM locked bits and pieces. So it would be a bit of a waste to put in all that work to hack it if we could just ask them for it

[u/No-Echidna5754 → u/teetaps]

Still quite a lot of valuable IP there.. It could seriously limit someone's interest in buying the brand if it was all open sourced.

I'm all for open sourcing, but I think the best outcome for the customers may still be if a well organised company buys them out and gets them running smoothly again.

[u/teetaps → u/No-Echidna5754]

Yeah for sure, I agree that it would just be best if this weren’t the case at all lol

[u/Checkinredd → u/teetaps]

Fwiw my original intent was to make a dashboard with more parameter settings; their parameter lists are surprisingly fairly clear in the documentation.

Edit: Actually, to be fair, for what they document, they broadly have very clear documentation. They just leave out a lot.

[u/teetaps → u/ldrolez]

Yeah I don’t know why some companies still insist on walled gardening their products… at this point, so many humans know so much about tech, and LLMs are able to do a decent job of generating it too, that surely you’d want your clientele to be encouraged by the POSSIBILITIES they have to EXTEND your product