Since January I’ve been finding it difficult to work on VCV Rack. I know that many of you are anticipating the release of Rack v2 and Rack for DAWs, so I apologize to everyone waiting on these versions. I will continue trying to work on these in the future, but it will be hard for me, emotionally and mentally.
I think v2 will bring the greatest update to VCV Rack yet, with thousands of development hours behind it. It will solve at least half of the criticisms of VCV Rack v1, so the wait will be worth it in the end.
Name restructure
I am not a fan of the name “Rack for DAWs”, so it will be renamed to simply VCV Rack. This bundle will include VST2 and standalone versions for $99 ($149 regular price after release sale). This will solve the issue of needing two separate installers (standalone and VST2) that may have mismatched versions. Professional support of both versions will be included in your purchase of Rack. This avoids the situation where a user who has paid for the VST2 version can’t get proper support for the standalone version.
The free version of Rack will be called Rack Community Edition or Rack CE (I’m not married to this name, feel free to suggest alternatives in a new thread). It will follow the same development process as Rack v1. Source code and builds of Rack CE will be available upon each release. Professional support will not be guaranteed for Rack CE (although bug reports will be appreciated). Rack CE will be released 1-2 weeks ahead of Rack. It won’t be an unstable branch but a release candidate branch for Rack.
Rack CE will be free software (GPLv3), meaning that you have the freedom to run, study, redistribute, and distribute modified copies of the software. I’ve seen some people confuse free/open-source software with open-contribution. VCV Rack is not open-contribution. I encourage you to read The Free Software Definition and The Open Source Definition for the principles and reasons for free/open-source software.
Finally, VCV Rack will no longer use GitHub Issues, since they are a poor solution for customers and non-developers to seek support. All support queries should be sent to contact@vcvrack.com. I might make this change in a few days or wait until Rack v2 is released.