computing modulation every sample seems like an enormous waste of CPU. I know some unusual audio rate modulations sound different if you don’t, but as a default doing all that math every sample seems like a weird choice.
So lots of great synths do filter fm. Surge does not. Similarly lots of great synths do oscillator fm. Surge does but surge rack does not. Both of these are audio rate modulation. Hence the explanation.
But I agree of course don’t waste cpu on things you won’t use
And I haven’t profiled these yet even although cpu load is pretty low. I need to get a dev environment with a working profiler for rack. Dtrace doesn’t peer theough Rosetta [EDIT: I figured out how to make xctrace and rosetta and rack work so now have detailed profilers!] and I don’t have a good sampling profiler running on linux yet. Anyway let’s not hijack this thread.
Yeah i was wondering about audio rate modulation, but 8 samples are probably fine and the CPU usage looks very good!
Thanks a lot for these! This will be a very powerful plugin and an instant favourite!
I can’t emphasize strongly enough how alpha the software you may have found is though. I promise when we are ready for beta testers we will announce it here but seriously things may crash and modules will change between now and then in innumerable ways! This is still alpha stuff. All the fx faceplates are placeholders for instance!
But yeah I’m glad you like them. We think they are great too!
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Someone is accusing @Squinky of being subtle???
I think he’s got strong opinions, and any subtlety is him trying to be tactful.
I love dearly the developers still willing to do the heavy lifting, but as I near the end of my 40 years as a software developer, I understand more than most not wanting to do it any more.
I’ve got nothing but respect and admiration for @Vortico but he’s also a person with strong opinions. As final arbiter of how Rack & it’s plugin ecosystem work, he can’t make everyone happy. A lot of the negativity in the Rack community is people upset about decisions Andrew & his team have made.
The other part of the negativity is trolls doing what trolls do. One thing @Vortico does that I 100% approve of, is he’s got no tolerance for trolls on this bulletin board.
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Showing your age there 
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Fidonet or GTFO
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Why don’t you reach out to ask those who left, instead of speculating anyone would leave for reasons so frivolous as not liking inconsequential API changes?
When my blog post about my experiences was deleted from VCV’s subreddit, and the Streisand effect propelled it to the front page of Hacker News and /r/synthesizers in reaction, my mail box wouldn’t stop ringing. First few days, mostly industry people who thanked me for my story. After that, mostly people hoping to find a safe place to be sincere and vulnerable about the emotional aftermath of their interactions with Andrew Belt.
Is it genuinely a concern to you if emotionally fragile developers get weeded out? While I deeply regret getting involved with VCV, you guys are still there.
The overwhelming majority of you are older men with much more stable life circumstances, more social status afforded by your gender identity and other immutable characteristics, the financial safety to own professional modular hardware at all, and a lifetime of skills in technical fields: you will never experience any impostor syndrome if you are belittled and treated like an incompetent nuisance, and you will not be deeply hurt when you are faced with the discursive style Andrew Belt regularly uses to talk down to people. You guys feel 100% at home in this gentlemen’s country club, you are at no risk of ever leaving yourselves. You are a much better culture fit than weak people who can’t deal well with bullies.
The beauty of the libre software movement is that engineers are disposable and trivially replaced, isn’t it?
By the way, why has none one of you picked up my module collection, implemented the requested features, fixed the known graphical bug, updated the widgets to fit in properly with 2.0’s skeuomorphic visual style and emissive channel, edited the documentation and its graphics to reflect the changes in VCV2, and finished the many missing modules I had documented and prototyped? The GPL3 allows you to do it. Falk fixed the widgets to work in Cardinal, it’s cool, but it’s just the simplest hack possible to stop crashes, so the knobs now look visually wrong. I think someone made unofficial builds too, it’s cool, but it’s a 5 minutes job anyone who knows their way around a command line can do. Is not a single one of you eager to to provide that unpaid labor, to the same uncompromising standards of quality I upheld in my work, and take in good humor any abuse you will face?
And it is a provable fact there is genuine demand for my stuff: an objective measure of their success is that I received enough requests for hardware versions to seriously consider open hardware variants once I am more skilled in PCB design and microcontroller programming.
I am glad that Andrew Belt is no longer stunting my self-esteem and feel much happier and accomplished about things I’m building outside VCV. I no longer perform or record music with VCV either, as it causes me too much sadness to make good music with it anymore.
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I dont want to get involved with the rest, but can comment on this that as far as I know your modules are working 100% with Cardinal. I am not aware of any issues besides some widgets not implementing the dark mode special drawing that allows to “glow in the dark” so to speak. The PR for the v2 update is still open as per Update to v2 API by falkTX · Pull Request #82 · AriaSalvatrice/AriaModules · GitHub
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I don’t want to get involved either but I will say that casting aspertions regarding other peoples’ gender is bad form.
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I imagine the general feeling is that had you wanted your modules to be ported to V2, you would have done it yourself. Lots of modules that were not ported by the original developer have indeed been ported by others. Your modules were highly regarded. I may be wrong but my impression was you did not want your modules in Rack 2 and people respected that, whatever the license says.
It’s also perhaps worth noting that the two posts below yours both start with the words “I don’t want to get involved…” - that sentiment may have had something to do with it too.
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As expected, Aria is more eloquent than me, and sums up my thoughts on the VCV community pretty completely.
To all the people who have replied or messaged me expressing surprise that I would ever feel unwelcome here, I urge you to read the blog post on her website about leaving VCV.
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I’ll be blunt: This really pisses me off.
I’m good friends with many of the old VCV devs, and Andrew and I have had long talks about this on Discord and the continued double standard here (VCV itself is open source, after all) is maddening. I want to be able to share my source code for others to build off of, and I don’t care if someone starts to distribute binaries. That’s inconvient enough compared to just using the library I think most would pay - or, we could do Pay what you want, as suggest above.
This is the biggest thing that has kept me from wanting to do more VCV dev after releasing LyraeModules and the Pink Trombone port - I wanted my next set to net some cash, but still be open source.
Edit: On my lurch break so I haven’t read past the comment this in reply to. I’ll catch up and read Aria’s comment when I get back.
All caught up and ready to reply with more detail:
I can’t help but feel there is a very awkward power imbalance in what is allowed for plugin devs. Yes, it’s Andrew’s project, he maintains the library, etc. - but, as has been said a million times - much of the success of VCV is clearly owed to third party plugin devs. Bogaudio, Valley, Geodesics, this goes on - they’re as much required for use at this point as the core.
I don’t think Cardnial, which I’m sure is still a pain point to Andrew and the VCV company, would even exist if this power imbalance were better handled. To be clear, I’m not hating on Andrew with this. Everything he’s done seems rational from his perspective. I think what’s been lacking is this open dialouge of why some devs are frustrated.
From what I can tell it’s mostly people who find the current system not flexible enough and some people not feeling welcome.
As for the first point:
Some people want it to be possible to have open source, paid plugins. To not allow this when VCV itself is open source but Pro is paid feels … slimey? I agree that releasing a plugin as paid and then suddenly making it open could make users feel like they got screwed, but at the very least allowing for open source from the start but not free-to-use graphics sounds like it’s reasonable (The SlimeChild agreement, if I understand correctly). Given it seems most plugins are already open source code but no-derivitive graphics, this seems like a natural direction, and an option I would take given the chance.
As for the not feeling welcome, I again don’t want to attribute that entirely on mods - in fact, I think they generally do a good job around here. I also don’t want to blame the community. I don’t know who to blame, and ultimately I don’t think blame even helps much. Plus, frankly, I am one of the well off white guys - at least on the surface. I’m also bi, a furry, and probably a dozen other things people could find reason to attack me for. Do I feel welcome in this community always? No.
But that’s because this community doesn’t have much to tie it together. It’s for VCV rack. That’s it. Because of that, it’s full of all types, including a lot of people I myself don’t particularly want to hang out with. But that’s true of any online community without a narrow enough focus. I mainly spend my days hanging out in chats full of furry engineers that into modular synths. That’s a pretty narrow, small group, and also means I feel immensely welcome because we all know each other and think alike. Asking for a community as broad as this is like asking for everyone current in a supermarket to be friends - They’re their for groceries, not to socialize. The fact that things even go as smoothly and stay as friendly as they do around here is honestly a bit impressive.
Let me tie this in with another hobby of mine: Ham radio. It’s almost exclusively Trump supporting old while males. Now, I don’t want to get into politics, but I am not a trump supporting old … well I am a white male. I couldn’t feel any less welcome at HAM events. But does that mean I don’t enjoy the hobby? no. Does it mean there aren’t others like me in the hobby? also no. I just have to look harder for those groups. And I did find one (Ham Furs).
I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive for a better community, but I think having a reasonable expectation of what this place is and encouraging to find better niches is wise.
@slimechildaudio - if you’re looking for a group to kick it with and the following sounds good (I don’t know anything about what you’re looking for) shoot me a message: @Aria_Salvatrice is already in mine where we hang out with a bunch hardware and software modular devs that also happen to be predominately furry, LGBT, and nerdy as hell. We’d love to have you.
edit: my god I wrote a novella.
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I just want to echo Steve’s answer as my own. I did read your blog post Aria. I would never have thought to fork your collection after reading that. I admire your collections very much.
The author of the Mog collection also left the community over your blog post. They made it even clearer they did not want their collection in the VCV Library. Despite how much I loved that collection, rather than forking it I took inspiration from it when making my own modules.
FWIW. It makes me sad that this community makes people feel excluded. I hope through my actions I can make it better.
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I wouldn’t say it’s “why” I left VCV dev, but I do believe that the value proposition of VCV pro is “pay a small amount to VCV, get access to thousands of free modules”. I certainly feel VCV deserves every dollar they can get for the excellent VCV stuff, but it does leave a little bit of a bad taste to be a provider of the free modules.
@Vega - Wow! That really is a novella - and well thought out and well written. Thank you for providing a balanced view point from multiple perspectives.
@Aria_Salvatrice, @slimechildaudio - It hurts to read how you feel unwelcome, in multiple ways - both from a sense of empathy toward you, but also from a sense of feeling attacked by you. I am in that hetero privileged white male group, but I have nothing but respect and admiration for the polished VCV work you have done, and am saddened that you feel unwelcome and find yourselves not wanting to continue participation with VCV - it is definitely an unfortunate loss for all. And I have seen many posts from others voicing similar sentiments, and lots of support given. So if you indiscriminately rant about the community at large, it hurts and puts me in a defensive posture - it is hard to remain empathetic and supportive while feeling attacked and defensive.
I am not trying to invalidate or reject how you feel - I have no doubt your feelings are genuine, intense, and well earned (an odd phrase, but I hope you understand what I mean). But I think (or at least hope) that your intent is not to antagonize the many (probably the majority of) people in this community that support and respect you. Whether in the privileged majority, or the vulnerable minority, the words we use matter.
Coriander - I am gladdened by recent posts from you offering a glimmer of hope that you may return to regular contributions to VCV. If you do, I genuinely hope your experience returns to being a positive one.
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I ported your plugin and some others to Rack 2 based on the repos for Cardinale (I did not ask you for your permission because of GPL3).
I did not implement “requested features” because I was not aware of any feature request (beside the fact that I’m primarily working on my own modules).
I did not fix “graphical bugs” because I was not aware of them.
And I did not update widgets to the new “skeuomorphic visual style” because I don’t like this style. I also did not update the GUI of my own modules.
Personally, I’m not an old man, I don’t have money left to buy modular hardware. I’m focused on my own modules (beneath my job for living) and I use this community to share knowledge and other fun stuff.
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Hi Aria. I would love to see you return here as a developer and be a role model for inclusiveness, kindness, helpfulness to and share your wonderful modules.
As you know, I left at the same time as you two years ago, over the same issues. I came back a year ago to port Meander to V2 after grieving for a year that I had abandoned the VCV implementation of Meander. I was very cautious before coming back but decided from a non-technical side, VCV had improved. There is now an ethics guideline regarding abandoned plugins and the adoption of such modules. There is less overt toxic behavior towards open source developers.
But, not all problems have been resolved, and probably they never will as it seems like most online communities still have a lot “flame-wars”. That doesn’t make toxic and uncivil behavior right and I still have to ignore a lot of crap.
Personally, before coming back here, I made a promise to myself to try to be a role model for civil, kind and helpful behavior and to try to not make problems worse by reacting to bad behavior, but I still do point out that there is much room for improvement here and I try to post things that try to call out uncivil behavior, without being uncivil myself.
Meander is now the best version it has ever been over its 34+ year history. I’m glad I came back even though I don’t always enjoy the community or leadership. I try to focus on making Meander better, making music with Meander and other modules and communicating what is possible, by example. I still have some self-esteem wounds that resulted from unkind words here regarding my approach to R&D that I have chosen based on my 50 years of modular experience and my 50 years of computer programming experience, including 40 years of professional experience.
It thrills me to see musicians use Meander in their music and publish to YouTube or SoundCloud. I focus on that evidence that my work is of value and appreciated by the user community.
Anyway, I would love to have you return here and port your modules to V2. The port effort is pretty much trivial. But, I understand if you do not want to return.
It is good to hear from you.
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