6 ms·

Why I’ll never create modules for VCV Rack anymore–and what I’ll make instead

188 points by yummypaint 5y ago

detaro 5y ago
Ooof. I thought VCVRack was an unusual but interesting balance between open and closed with lots of potential, but such shenanigans are terrible.
Archit3ch 5y ago
Of course this pops up on my feed as I'm about to code a VCV Rack module...
- detaro 5y ago
  Better now than in a few weeks?
myself248 5y ago
So where's the fork? I mean someone forked GIMP to get away from the dumb name.... HN has a pretty wide reach, but TFA was awfully long, I hope enough folks will read this to perhaps coalesce a critical mass around a real fork, with legs, and a proper community.
- Firerouge 5y ago
  The article has a whole section on VCV's efforts to suppress forking > VCV has been trying to prevent forks both through legal and social means, so there’s no viable fork yet. > There’s MiRack, a fork of VCV for Mac OS and iPhone. Any mention of it within the VCV community is immediately deleted, and its author is banned, so it exists completely disconnected from the VCV community > There used to be VeeSeeVST, another fork of VCV for the VST plugin architecture, but it’s dead: the VCV project asked the author to discontinue the fork in June 2019, to avoid competing with VCV’s commercial offering > The last fork I know of is the Sonaremin, but it is better understood as a customized distribution of a VCV Rack build for the Raspberry Pi than as a fork
  - elihu 5y ago
    Yep. It sounds like a fork at this point would probably be a good thing, but it's hard to get momentum behind a fork effort if mentioning the fork means being censored or banished from the existing VCVRack community. This also makes me wonder if maybe any open source software community should ideally be based on some platform moderated by a neutral party. Or at least that there's some mechanism to escalate censorship issues to someone unaffiliated with the project. One of the problems with reddit seems to be that the moderators of any given subreddit are basically monarchs
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I don't think that's how open source works, in practice. A project like this tends to gravitate around a single leader of some sort: I can think of several examples. That leader might very well be impolite or opinionated but they deliver a single communicable vision and other contributors tend to be neither able to, nor welcome to supplant that. I read all the way through, looking for the answer to the posted question, since VCV Rack interests me. Latest I heard about Andrew and VCV Rack, he'd got mad at Apple's M1 processors (presumably because he makes heavy use of Intel assembly code?) and shows no interest in developing for 'em. If Rack stumbles, I think it'll more likely be due to some personal animus of that nature, rather than the fact of Andrew being a big meanie. The role of a leader in a project of this type is to be, if not a big meanie, then at least a big definer of what the project is and isn't. This will always alienate some people. Does that matter? Depends on what they're being alienated about. I don't think VCV Rack is the right place for Aria, and I think she's wise to step away. Can't say as I agree with all of her points but then I'm not her so I don't have to.
- drmr 5y ago
  I'd call it `FreeCV`.
malwrar 5y ago
I'm not really sure why the author is taking the behavior of this VCV guy so personally, is there some new community expectation that a single maintainer trying to survive running an open source software modular synth project is also supposed to e.g. gracefully answer misc technical questions on community support channels? All of the sections in this post describing some aspect of the toxic culture fail to deliver, and mostly just sound like entitlement to this specific maintainer's time, which sounds fairly limited. Also, unrelated but cool modules. I envy the artistic ability that goes into the theming the author did.
- detaro 5y ago
  That feels like quite a misrepresentation of the authors post. Especially criticizing (IMHO questionable) policies is not entitlement to this specific maintainer's time. Even the specific example, do you really think "is also supposed to e.g. gracefully answer misc technical questions on community support channels" is a good takeaway from > Contributors treated rudely. Contributors made to understand that their time is basically worthless. Nobody was treated like a contributor anyway, I felt treated as if I should be thankful to even be allowed to provide value to this company. You’d see people–people much more technically experienced than me–asking reasonable technical questions in the development channel of the project’s Discord, and Andrew Belt would tell them how much he charges per hour for consulting. What’s even the point of having such a channel then?
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Since when do we elevate a difference of opinion to rudeness? Not every maintainer has the same objectives for their project being open source. Not every project maintainer gives their time or attention to (potential) contributors.
  - malwrar 5y ago
    > do you really think ... is a good takeaway from ... Sure, I've seen that sort of response many times from technical communities with newbies who demand too much of someone's time. It's the only specific example in that entire section, and the author continues throughout the post to point out how valuable they believe contributors' time is. It seems to me like one of the core issues motivating this post is a mismatch in expectations about how valuable that time is, thus my conclusion The rest of the post isn't really substantial otherwise. The code of conduct section has no tangible or even hinted examples of selective enforcement, just the author stating they know any reports are going to Andrew, and that they don't trust Andrew to actually be fair. The section about inclusion of women is actually about a single provocative thread getting locked (new member doesn't see the "swells of women" they expected to see in the forum roster, assumes all the members are guys who are "bro-ing it up", then tells them to police themselves), with the author somehow concluding that as a sign women aren't welcome in the community. I'm not sure how the name re-registration policy is evidence of a toxic culture, but even if it was on-topic the author doesn't really seem too understanding of the problem it's intended to solve, and that the ethics policy they link indicates that the intent is for legitimate cases of theft to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The hostility to forking section seemed fishy, but by the time I got to that section honestly I felt like it was another case of the author crying wolf and didn't bother looking for the details the author should have included.
spacechild1 5y ago
Very long and convoluted post, but quite some interesting stuff there. The modules look beautiful, btw! Just want correct the paragraph about VST3: it's supported by every decent DAW now. And since most people use a framework, like JUCE or iPlug2, for developing VST plugins, the differences between VST2 and VST3 (mostly) disappear.
waythro111 5y ago
As far as I know VCV is less of a community per se than a commercial venture. Sometimes I think that the many different interpretations of "open source" leads to clash and conflict. There is the side where open source is merely a way to share code, a side where it is primarily community oriented,a side where FOSS is a mechanism of freedom and liberation, and so on. I think this incident makes me feel that in any commercially-focused open source project I create I should be clear or that intention. Otherwise my focus on releasing code, and building a business and the corresponding lack of focus on community niceties may come back to bite me. Open source is not necessarily about the community and not necessarily about you. I think it would be good to fork the project to make a community focused variant. I don't think the VCV rack guy, though, Is necessarily falling short of any duties, because from my external perception it was never a community focused project. For example, the core afaik (unless I'm thinking of something different) is not "open contribution" at all.
- spacechild1 5y ago
  It's perfectly ok not to be a community project, but you should be upfront about it. What I find strange is the hostility towards forking. I mean, why use the GPL then? If you want to create a commercial app, but still share (some) code, you can do it this way: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite#license https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite#license
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Because GPLv3 allows the license exemption that allows him to license VCV Rack to anyone trying to make and sell a commercial plugin. https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/LICENSE.md https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/LICENSE.md It's actually a fairly interesting business model.
    - spacechild1 5y ago
      But why use the GPL if you don't want people to fork? Just publish the source code under a custom EULA that does exactly what you want.
deorder 5y ago
That is horrible and I did not fully realize this was going on. I've been waiting for VCVRack 2 forever to get the VST support and invested a lot of money in the current VCVRack. Aria I wish you the best with you future / current endeavors and in something people will actually respect you. I really hope a good and fully open source alternative will come up soon.
creamytaco 5y ago
What a wall of text. I stopped reading half way through. Advice to author: Condense your points, avoid whining (or coming across as such), tighten up your writing. Expressing yourself clearly and to the point makes a big difference in reader engagement and (ultimately) understanding and support for your POV.
- owyn 5y ago
  Sure, when your "I Quit" rant needs a table of contents you might want to dial it back a little. They make a lot of valid points but you can also just stop working on stuff (and there's a paragraph saying that several other plugin makers have just quietly quit). They're making this post for multiple reasons. You might want to read it and think about some of it, what would you do in the same situation, etc? Having been in the same kind of mood at times, I can totally understand the motivation to write this all down and walk out the door with two middle fingers in the air saying "I QUIT".
- neilv 5y ago
  Your suggestions of how to tighten it up seem good, were their only goal to communicate to the largest audience. But I'm guessing that's not their only goal, especially since the topic is of course a major personal investment for the writer. What if the exercise of expressing themself is a primary goal, and this is how they wanted to do it? What if they want to communicate more, to a smaller audience, maybe within that community, where some people will invest more time in reading than the median HNer?
- Xorlev 5y ago
  It's an outpouring of the author's thoughts, feelings, and background of the whole space. Through it, you get a sense for how invested she is in a niche space. I can't speak for the author, but it felt like catharsis in blogpost form, rather than a plea for understanding or a call to arms -- such a post does not need to get to the point or cater to your wishes. It's unfortunate that your takeaway was "TL;DR plz, also stop whining". HN's rules specifically call out this behavior: > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Your comment comes off as a very shallow attempt at critical feedback, and I have a hard time believing it's intended to do anything other than tear the author down.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
It took me way too long to realize that the player in the intro is an actual media player and not a GIF:)
- sp332 5y ago
  You can download the Winamp skin from https://archive.org/details/winampskins_Utena_-_Pink_Utena https://archive.org/details/winampskins_Utena_-_Pink_Utena Still no details there about who to credit though.
serverholic 5y ago
Why does an online forum about music software need to go out of its way to create a welcoming environment for women? Obviously if there was abuse, and misogyny going on it should be addressed but I don't see anything on that forum that is gendered at all really. To quote someone from the VCV forum "I dont get it… is somebody doing something not appropriate against a woman here?" EDIT: Why am I being downvoted? What makes that forum not welcoming for women? What needs to be changed?
- Jedd 5y ago
  I think the point was that 'the community' noticed the imbalance, and then spoke about it (refer the link in TFA [0]) and then ... nothing (useful) happened. It's slightly tangential to the seemingly quite hostile environment over there, but certainly not unrelated given the context, and the author's gender. [0] https://archive.is/vh3Ye https://archive.is/vh3Ye
  - serverholic 5y ago
    That's what I'm asking. What (useful) thing should have happened? The only hostility I'm seeing is people reacting strongly to the implication that their forum isn't friendly to women.
    - Jedd 5y ago
      > That's what I'm asking. What (useful) thing should have happened? It is beyond my competence to answer that question, for a variety of reasons, mostly because I'm not especially active in the VCV community. Also I don't think equality of outcomes is always a laudable goal, but inequality of outcomes can certainly be an indicator of something being off upstream.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
georgeoliver 5y ago
I'm a relatively new synth/modular enthusiast so I can't comment on the author's take on VCV (I use Wren, a quite interesting software modular in its own right), but I have to say their ideas for Séanceur sound rad!
- myself248 5y ago
  I am SO excited by that. As a halfhearted collector of niche or obscure input devices, I'm totally fascinated by these ideas for new ways inputs could be used to influence the music, and new ways for music to accept influence from inputs. If VCV's poor treatment of contributors ends up spawning a whole new idea in modulars, everyone wins.
busterarm 5y ago
Why has HN become the forum via which people aire/settle their personal disagreements in the tech community? Why do we allow and highlight blog posts doing things that we wouldn't allow between users in the comments? I swear like twice a week there's an "X was mean to Y" thread naming names and companies. We've developed an appetite for personal drama and it isn't healthy. This is like our version of a gossip column. Edit: How do we not have better standards than 4chan, where the immediate response would be "Not Your Personal Army" and move on?
- Firerouge 5y ago
  This analysis seems to be based on a shallow reading of the content. Much of the post is a background into the author's experience learning programming to create uniquely featured plugins, intermixed with complaints about the tech ecosystem they're walled-gardened in, followed by a product announcement for Séanceur. This seems exactly like the posts HN is all about
  - busterarm 5y ago
    90% of the post is a long, emotion-fueled rant with a product announcement at the very end. Framing matters. We all learned this by high school. If you're trying to pitch new thing, the form of the article should be inverted. That's the difference between well-intentioned content with a reader in mind and something that's self-serving instead. Some bloggers need editors. Worse still, the last section about Séanceur kind of indicates that the author doesn't have a very good understanding of what it is they're building and makes me call into question the entire account.
    - Firerouge 5y ago
      Personally I don't think HN should discourage or censor blog posts for being verbose, airing relevant recent personal drama, or taking a roundabout path to their point
      - busterarm 5y ago
nyanpasu64 5y ago
> Making this collection as it stands today, and its accompanying documentation, took me at the very least 400 hours. > I know that number sounds higher than you’d expect, since I only made 22 modules. Maybe some of you might think “I could do that in 30% of that time”. Even having already learned real-time and audio programming from prior experience, I don't think I'd be able to put out 22 modules in 133 hours, or even 400 hours, let alone with appealing theming. Maybe I overthink everything, finding flaws in my own code, others' code, trying to build optimal designs, and every piece of conflicting information, every new idea, tears down ideas I've had, implemented, and had thought were good. EDIT: Finished reading, things i agree, things i don't agree, most of it is interesting... Some takeaways and my thoughts: - learning that free software clones of Mutable Instruments hardware exist - my perfectionism vs. the author's "just get it out" - "Inclusion of women" (probably controversial) - software licensing, community management (deflemask and snes tracker also screwed up their licensing/community, leading to Discord servers discussing and telling each other how the program authors are doing bad things) - wonder what the author would think of the Rust Audio community (and it's a community, not a company, and it seems quite approachable from what I've seen in it, lots of ideas, though half-finished UI/code frameworks) - synthesizers with timing vs. standalone sequencers - c++ vs. jit/gc/interpreted languages
- packetslave 5y ago
  learning that free software clones of Mutable Instruments hardware exist One of the lovely things about Mutable is that Émilie makes all of the hardware designs open-source (either GPL or MIT). Both software and hardware clones are widely available. https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack
  - mxmilkiib 5y ago
    There's also an LV2 port; https://github.com/polyeffects/lenticular_lv2 https://github.com/polyeffects/lenticular_lv2 In Carla https://i.imgur.com/SiXm8Iy.png https://i.imgur.com/SiXm8Iy.png
mxmilkiib 5y ago
If anyone is interested in FOSS CV software, check out the CV side of LV2 and JACK; https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242 https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242 Which can be used for stuff like https://kx.studio/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png https://kx.studio/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png Re previous VCV hrm; https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/pull/1406 https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/pull/1406 and https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/1396 https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/1396 which was deleted after paying customers started to complain on it.
risktopark 5y ago
I love this. More power to you Aria.

188 points by yummypaint 5y ago

Ooof. I thought VCVRack was an unusual but interesting balance between open and closed with lots of potential, but such shenanigans are terrible.

Archit3ch 5y ago

Of course this pops up on my feed as I'm about to code a VCV Rack module...

detaro 5y ago
Better now than in a few weeks?

myself248 5y ago

So where's the fork? I mean someone forked GIMP to get away from the dumb name.... HN has a pretty wide reach, but TFA was awfully long, I hope enough folks will read this to perhaps coalesce a critical mass around a real fork, with legs, and a proper community.

Firerouge 5y ago
The article has a whole section on VCV's efforts to suppress forking > VCV has been trying to prevent forks both through legal and social means, so there’s no viable fork yet. > There’s MiRack, a fork of VCV for Mac OS and iPhone. Any mention of it within the VCV community is immediately deleted, and its author is banned, so it exists completely disconnected from the VCV community > There used to be VeeSeeVST, another fork of VCV for the VST plugin architecture, but it’s dead: the VCV project asked the author to discontinue the fork in June 2019, to avoid competing with VCV’s commercial offering > The last fork I know of is the Sonaremin, but it is better understood as a customized distribution of a VCV Rack build for the Raspberry Pi than as a fork
- elihu 5y ago
  Yep. It sounds like a fork at this point would probably be a good thing, but it's hard to get momentum behind a fork effort if mentioning the fork means being censored or banished from the existing VCVRack community. This also makes me wonder if maybe any open source software community should ideally be based on some platform moderated by a neutral party. Or at least that there's some mechanism to escalate censorship issues to someone unaffiliated with the project. One of the problems with reddit seems to be that the moderators of any given subreddit are basically monarchs
Applejinx 5y ago
I don't think that's how open source works, in practice. A project like this tends to gravitate around a single leader of some sort: I can think of several examples. That leader might very well be impolite or opinionated but they deliver a single communicable vision and other contributors tend to be neither able to, nor welcome to supplant that. I read all the way through, looking for the answer to the posted question, since VCV Rack interests me. Latest I heard about Andrew and VCV Rack, he'd got mad at Apple's M1 processors (presumably because he makes heavy use of Intel assembly code?) and shows no interest in developing for 'em. If Rack stumbles, I think it'll more likely be due to some personal animus of that nature, rather than the fact of Andrew being a big meanie. The role of a leader in a project of this type is to be, if not a big meanie, then at least a big definer of what the project is and isn't. This will always alienate some people. Does that matter? Depends on what they're being alienated about. I don't think VCV Rack is the right place for Aria, and I think she's wise to step away. Can't say as I agree with all of her points but then I'm not her so I don't have to.
drmr 5y ago
I'd call it `FreeCV`.

malwrar 5y ago

I'm not really sure why the author is taking the behavior of this VCV guy so personally, is there some new community expectation that a single maintainer trying to survive running an open source software modular synth project is also supposed to e.g. gracefully answer misc technical questions on community support channels? All of the sections in this post describing some aspect of the toxic culture fail to deliver, and mostly just sound like entitlement to this specific maintainer's time, which sounds fairly limited. Also, unrelated but cool modules. I envy the artistic ability that goes into the theming the author did.

detaro 5y ago
That feels like quite a misrepresentation of the authors post. Especially criticizing (IMHO questionable) policies is not entitlement to this specific maintainer's time. Even the specific example, do you really think "is also supposed to e.g. gracefully answer misc technical questions on community support channels" is a good takeaway from > Contributors treated rudely. Contributors made to understand that their time is basically worthless. Nobody was treated like a contributor anyway, I felt treated as if I should be thankful to even be allowed to provide value to this company. You’d see people–people much more technically experienced than me–asking reasonable technical questions in the development channel of the project’s Discord, and Andrew Belt would tell them how much he charges per hour for consulting. What’s even the point of having such a channel then?
- busterarm 5y ago
  Since when do we elevate a difference of opinion to rudeness? Not every maintainer has the same objectives for their project being open source. Not every project maintainer gives their time or attention to (potential) contributors.
- malwrar 5y ago
  > do you really think ... is a good takeaway from ... Sure, I've seen that sort of response many times from technical communities with newbies who demand too much of someone's time. It's the only specific example in that entire section, and the author continues throughout the post to point out how valuable they believe contributors' time is. It seems to me like one of the core issues motivating this post is a mismatch in expectations about how valuable that time is, thus my conclusion The rest of the post isn't really substantial otherwise. The code of conduct section has no tangible or even hinted examples of selective enforcement, just the author stating they know any reports are going to Andrew, and that they don't trust Andrew to actually be fair. The section about inclusion of women is actually about a single provocative thread getting locked (new member doesn't see the "swells of women" they expected to see in the forum roster, assumes all the members are guys who are "bro-ing it up", then tells them to police themselves), with the author somehow concluding that as a sign women aren't welcome in the community. I'm not sure how the name re-registration policy is evidence of a toxic culture, but even if it was on-topic the author doesn't really seem too understanding of the problem it's intended to solve, and that the ethics policy they link indicates that the intent is for legitimate cases of theft to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The hostility to forking section seemed fishy, but by the time I got to that section honestly I felt like it was another case of the author crying wolf and didn't bother looking for the details the author should have included.

spacechild1 5y ago

Very long and convoluted post, but quite some interesting stuff there. The modules look beautiful, btw! Just want correct the paragraph about VST3: it's supported by every decent DAW now. And since most people use a framework, like JUCE or iPlug2, for developing VST plugins, the differences between VST2 and VST3 (mostly) disappear.

waythro111 5y ago

As far as I know VCV is less of a community per se than a commercial venture. Sometimes I think that the many different interpretations of "open source" leads to clash and conflict. There is the side where open source is merely a way to share code, a side where it is primarily community oriented,a side where FOSS is a mechanism of freedom and liberation, and so on. I think this incident makes me feel that in any commercially-focused open source project I create I should be clear or that intention. Otherwise my focus on releasing code, and building a business and the corresponding lack of focus on community niceties may come back to bite me. Open source is not necessarily about the community and not necessarily about you. I think it would be good to fork the project to make a community focused variant. I don't think the VCV rack guy, though, Is necessarily falling short of any duties, because from my external perception it was never a community focused project. For example, the core afaik (unless I'm thinking of something different) is not "open contribution" at all.

spacechild1 5y ago
It's perfectly ok not to be a community project, but you should be upfront about it. What I find strange is the hostility towards forking. I mean, why use the GPL then? If you want to create a commercial app, but still share (some) code, you can do it this way: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite#license https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite#license
- busterarm 5y ago
  Because GPLv3 allows the license exemption that allows him to license VCV Rack to anyone trying to make and sell a commercial plugin. https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/LICENSE.md https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/LICENSE.md It's actually a fairly interesting business model.
  - spacechild1 5y ago
    But why use the GPL if you don't want people to fork? Just publish the source code under a custom EULA that does exactly what you want.

deorder 5y ago

That is horrible and I did not fully realize this was going on. I've been waiting for VCVRack 2 forever to get the VST support and invested a lot of money in the current VCVRack. Aria I wish you the best with you future / current endeavors and in something people will actually respect you. I really hope a good and fully open source alternative will come up soon.

creamytaco 5y ago

What a wall of text. I stopped reading half way through. Advice to author: Condense your points, avoid whining (or coming across as such), tighten up your writing. Expressing yourself clearly and to the point makes a big difference in reader engagement and (ultimately) understanding and support for your POV.

owyn 5y ago
Sure, when your "I Quit" rant needs a table of contents you might want to dial it back a little. They make a lot of valid points but you can also just stop working on stuff (and there's a paragraph saying that several other plugin makers have just quietly quit). They're making this post for multiple reasons. You might want to read it and think about some of it, what would you do in the same situation, etc? Having been in the same kind of mood at times, I can totally understand the motivation to write this all down and walk out the door with two middle fingers in the air saying "I QUIT".
neilv 5y ago
Your suggestions of how to tighten it up seem good, were their only goal to communicate to the largest audience. But I'm guessing that's not their only goal, especially since the topic is of course a major personal investment for the writer. What if the exercise of expressing themself is a primary goal, and this is how they wanted to do it? What if they want to communicate more, to a smaller audience, maybe within that community, where some people will invest more time in reading than the median HNer?
Xorlev 5y ago
It's an outpouring of the author's thoughts, feelings, and background of the whole space. Through it, you get a sense for how invested she is in a niche space. I can't speak for the author, but it felt like catharsis in blogpost form, rather than a plea for understanding or a call to arms -- such a post does not need to get to the point or cater to your wishes. It's unfortunate that your takeaway was "TL;DR plz, also stop whining". HN's rules specifically call out this behavior: > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Your comment comes off as a very shallow attempt at critical feedback, and I have a hard time believing it's intended to do anything other than tear the author down.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

It took me way too long to realize that the player in the intro is an actual media player and not a GIF:)

sp332 5y ago
You can download the Winamp skin from https://archive.org/details/winampskins_Utena_-_Pink_Utena https://archive.org/details/winampskins_Utena_-_Pink_Utena Still no details there about who to credit though.

serverholic 5y ago

Why does an online forum about music software need to go out of its way to create a welcoming environment for women? Obviously if there was abuse, and misogyny going on it should be addressed but I don't see anything on that forum that is gendered at all really. To quote someone from the VCV forum "I dont get it… is somebody doing something not appropriate against a woman here?" EDIT: Why am I being downvoted? What makes that forum not welcoming for women? What needs to be changed?

Jedd 5y ago
I think the point was that 'the community' noticed the imbalance, and then spoke about it (refer the link in TFA [0]) and then ... nothing (useful) happened. It's slightly tangential to the seemingly quite hostile environment over there, but certainly not unrelated given the context, and the author's gender. [0] https://archive.is/vh3Ye https://archive.is/vh3Ye
- serverholic 5y ago
  That's what I'm asking. What (useful) thing should have happened? The only hostility I'm seeing is people reacting strongly to the implication that their forum isn't friendly to women.
  - Jedd 5y ago
    > That's what I'm asking. What (useful) thing should have happened? It is beyond my competence to answer that question, for a variety of reasons, mostly because I'm not especially active in the VCV community. Also I don't think equality of outcomes is always a laudable goal, but inequality of outcomes can certainly be an indicator of something being off upstream.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

georgeoliver 5y ago

I'm a relatively new synth/modular enthusiast so I can't comment on the author's take on VCV (I use Wren, a quite interesting software modular in its own right), but I have to say their ideas for Séanceur sound rad!

myself248 5y ago
I am SO excited by that. As a halfhearted collector of niche or obscure input devices, I'm totally fascinated by these ideas for new ways inputs could be used to influence the music, and new ways for music to accept influence from inputs. If VCV's poor treatment of contributors ends up spawning a whole new idea in modulars, everyone wins.

busterarm 5y ago

Why has HN become the forum via which people aire/settle their personal disagreements in the tech community? Why do we allow and highlight blog posts doing things that we wouldn't allow between users in the comments? I swear like twice a week there's an "X was mean to Y" thread naming names and companies. We've developed an appetite for personal drama and it isn't healthy. This is like our version of a gossip column. Edit: How do we not have better standards than 4chan, where the immediate response would be "Not Your Personal Army" and move on?

Firerouge 5y ago
This analysis seems to be based on a shallow reading of the content. Much of the post is a background into the author's experience learning programming to create uniquely featured plugins, intermixed with complaints about the tech ecosystem they're walled-gardened in, followed by a product announcement for Séanceur. This seems exactly like the posts HN is all about
- busterarm 5y ago
  90% of the post is a long, emotion-fueled rant with a product announcement at the very end. Framing matters. We all learned this by high school. If you're trying to pitch new thing, the form of the article should be inverted. That's the difference between well-intentioned content with a reader in mind and something that's self-serving instead. Some bloggers need editors. Worse still, the last section about Séanceur kind of indicates that the author doesn't have a very good understanding of what it is they're building and makes me call into question the entire account.
  - Firerouge 5y ago
    Personally I don't think HN should discourage or censor blog posts for being verbose, airing relevant recent personal drama, or taking a roundabout path to their point
    - busterarm 5y ago

nyanpasu64 5y ago

> Making this collection as it stands today, and its accompanying documentation, took me at the very least 400 hours. > I know that number sounds higher than you’d expect, since I only made 22 modules. Maybe some of you might think “I could do that in 30% of that time”. Even having already learned real-time and audio programming from prior experience, I don't think I'd be able to put out 22 modules in 133 hours, or even 400 hours, let alone with appealing theming. Maybe I overthink everything, finding flaws in my own code, others' code, trying to build optimal designs, and every piece of conflicting information, every new idea, tears down ideas I've had, implemented, and had thought were good. EDIT: Finished reading, things i agree, things i don't agree, most of it is interesting... Some takeaways and my thoughts: - learning that free software clones of Mutable Instruments hardware exist - my perfectionism vs. the author's "just get it out" - "Inclusion of women" (probably controversial) - software licensing, community management (deflemask and snes tracker also screwed up their licensing/community, leading to Discord servers discussing and telling each other how the program authors are doing bad things) - wonder what the author would think of the Rust Audio community (and it's a community, not a company, and it seems quite approachable from what I've seen in it, lots of ideas, though half-finished UI/code frameworks) - synthesizers with timing vs. standalone sequencers - c++ vs. jit/gc/interpreted languages

packetslave 5y ago
learning that free software clones of Mutable Instruments hardware exist One of the lovely things about Mutable is that Émilie makes all of the hardware designs open-source (either GPL or MIT). Both software and hardware clones are widely available. https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack
- mxmilkiib 5y ago
  There's also an LV2 port; https://github.com/polyeffects/lenticular_lv2 https://github.com/polyeffects/lenticular_lv2 In Carla https://i.imgur.com/SiXm8Iy.png https://i.imgur.com/SiXm8Iy.png

mxmilkiib 5y ago

If anyone is interested in FOSS CV software, check out the CV side of LV2 and JACK; https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242 https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242 Which can be used for stuff like https://kx.studio/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png https://kx.studio/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png Re previous VCV hrm; https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/pull/1406 https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/pull/1406 and https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/1396 https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/1396 which was deleted after paying customers started to complain on it.

risktopark 5y ago

I love this. More power to you Aria.