I know I said I am going to keep a low profile upon my return to VCV after a year’s absence, but this topic is probably the best place for me to explain myself. This is all I am going to say on the matter.
I left a year ago along with Aria due to the issue of appropriation of branding in the library for open source modules. The only reason I am back is because of the ethics guidelines that commit to an ethics covenant between VCV and 3rd party developers and between developers. I’m taking the guideline as a true covenant. I believe Andrew is committed to it, but I am unconvinced that all developers are. Of course it does not matter if some developers are not committed to it, as long as Andrew is. But, if some are not committed to it, it introduces extreme confusion and hard feelings if plugins are forked or otherwise modified without the authors permission. I believe a lot of of the V2 crashes are caused by this chaotic behavior.
In summary, I see rules as being of 3 types:
Legal
Ethical
Moral
Organizational
I take moral rules to be those said to come from god. I take ethical rules to be those that come from society and civilization. I take legal rules to be those that derive from the law and court decisions. Let’s not mix legal rules with ethics rules. I think everyone would agree that not every legal action is ethical in all cases. Moral laws are very dangerous in my mind, and I avoid them.
In summary, I was unhappy in the past. I chose to come back due to the ethics guidelines. I am good with the future as-is, as long as the ethics guidelines are followed. Others may feel differently. Everyone should be free to express their opinion and values.
There are currently no plugins in the library that have been forked and submitted without permission so I don’t see how that could be responsible for any crashes users are getting from library plugins?
Yes, to be clear, these do not make it into the library, but people are being advised to build their own copies of plugins and those make it into patches and lead to problems of SDK/API version incompatibilities. Everyone suffers from having to sort these issues out over and over.
This is just my opinion and perspective. I’m absolutely overwhelmed just trying to follow all of the V2 topics and threads.
Can we keep this discussion calm. It’s become obvious that there are passionate arguments on both sides of this debate. We’re fine with that but let’s keep it civil.
I doubt many systems are perfect, but if the discussions aren’t productive the system will either never change or will be changed for the worse.
Yes dev’s are frustrated, it’s always a tricky time especially around major updates. The VST has opened VCV up to a much wider audience and that is good for everyone as the ecosystem should get stronger, but for the moment it means more users with more bugs.
I don’t personally think poor documentation of the API is the issue, as I’m no serious programmer and was able to update many open-source plugins to V1, but I’m aware of many and varied frustrations of many devs and I know it’s been a tough.
I don’t think it should be take it or leave it. Our devs are awesome. I hope we lose none to the V2 transition and have been trying to help in that direction.
The paid variant that costs you time when you don’t profit is difficult for me to unpack. I’m going to attempt it, but please try and interpret what I’m saying sympathetically:
the cost of time and complaints is at it’s worst right now, it will get better as more devs understand what can go wrong. That doesn’t make it better, but it does suggest something along the lines of “just hang in there for the moment and hope it gets better soon”. I’m advocating for devs and to devs here. I get that this is made worse when new users are less flexible about crashing plugins than our more experienced users. Hang in there. Please. We love our devs.
It is your choice as to whether you share in the profit of more people having eyeballs on VCV. I personally think our free devs are some of the most legendary people on the planet. They make cool stuff for us to use and it doesn’t hurt our wallet at all. I’m never grumpy when someone releases a paid plugin, and I’m more than grateful when someone releases any plugin, free or paid but especially free. I would like to point out one way you profit, in that you made a plugin and didn’t hide it away on your computer for personal use only, but shared it with the whole community. Rack 2 and it’s marketing and the availability of a VST version makes your works of art available to a wider number of people.
New people to any community don’t always understand the lay of the land and need to be pointed in the right direction. I’ve been on the forum a lot these last few days trying to at least triage some of the problems and pointing people at the right channels. V2 is making this trickier as it’s attracting many new users onto the platform (which long term should be a great thing) at a time when our plugin devs haven’t got the resources to test their code on every different permutation and combination of OS and DAW. These are growing pains. That doesn’t make them any less fun, but it should mean they are at least temporary and beneficial in the long run.
We definitely need to work on user expectations. I don’t see that you should be expected to test on umpteen different platforms and certainly not with some of the heat that we’ve seen in the last few days. It’s been my advice for a long time (such as it is) that developers have a much easier time if they have a group of testers - which by the very nature of Rack often means a base of people with different OS’ and DAW’s than the developer. I know this is more overhead, but I think it makes it more enjoyable too. Most of the testing groups for various plugins are pretty fun places. If you have ideas for ways that this forum or VCV can help I’m sure happy to hear it.
the paid VST should make this community stronger in the long term.
Personally, my interactions with Andrew Belt have entirely destroyed my passion for creating music tools in the 8 months that followed, from October 2020 to May 2021 or so.
When I participated, I was keenly aware I had to be twice as good as everyone to even belong at all, first due to my identity, and second, because I owned no hardware whatsoever, unlike most developers, and thus, was painfully inexperienced with modular synthesis. When I look back at the modules I made, it’s with great sadness - there’s so few of them when I had so many plans. I had learned C++ specifically to make these modules, and was only starting to get skilled enough to work at an efficient pace.
I started to feel better when I wrote about my experiences in public. It also addressed the fact inclusion of women in the community was an obvbious problem. Many people thanked me for it, especially LGBT women who thanked me for letting them dodge a bullet, as they saw my presence in this community as a canary in the mine.
If you are dissatisfied, I encourage you to do the same: discussions in VCV community spaces that make it look bad are very frequently erased.
I do not know wether Rack’s paid toll gate gives people access to my old V1 modules, but if it does, and people ask me for support, I will tell them to e-mail VCV. It’s open-source, build it if you want. But if you want to monetize it, you don’t shift the burden of support onto me. I will only support it within Cardinal, or any other fork that respects contributors, and welcomes women to participate.
While there may be a bit of that, most of the people who are willing and able to build plugins from source are aware that they are beta versions that may not be stable. Nearly all the threads you see about crashes are from library plugins and by far the most common cause has been font loading methods which can sometimes cause no problems in the standalone version but cause havoc in the VST.
This thread is turning into a bit of a catch all drama thread, I think in part duo to me, so sorry for that. To me the take away is this:
some devs are finding supporting the VST more difficult
some users don’t understand the separation of VCV and 3rd party (and being kinda rude)
some OSS devs want money, either by making their plugins paid but still OSS or by having a more prominent donate button
VCV markets Rack, in part, based on the unpaid work of devs, which is now significantly more contentions as it (in a roundabout way) puts a feature of the module devs behind a pay wall from which they get no money
halfway through writing this @pgatt made the above “Point to consider” comment.
I didn’t have plugins in V0.6 to update to 1.0 to know the work required there, but it seem to me the framebuffer and graphics stuff from 1 → 2 is more complex.
To me the issue with the documentation is actually also an issue with licencing, as I think many plugins are only GPL because devs need to look at other GPL code to figure out how to do anything because of the poor documentation.
Thank you. That sentiment is greatly appreciated.
This is also true, and clearly it’s also the case for VCV as some of the stock plugins haven’t been totally fine out the gate either. Still, it would be significantly easier for devs to understand and build up a memory of those things if things were actually documented.
You’re right, it inflates your wallet. That’s sort of the problem here. It’s one thing for us to do free work for an open platform, its another to do free work for a closed one. I’m actually okay with additional work for the paid stuff knowing that it still caries over to the free one and that it helps fund development that benefits everyone, but I think if that’s the case some of that money should go back into to helping support the free plugin devs - in the form of documentation or help with testing on various platforms via someone with the job of testing plugins.
Then making these resources available to all devs needs to be a top priority imho.
It’s really hard to find testers that actually know enough about DSP and how rack code works to give good bug reports. “Is this that aliasing thing I’ve heard about?”
This I agree with, and is why I’m still largely in support of the business model, I just want to be sure at least some of the profit goes into improving rack for developers outside of VCV.
I can only speak for myself. I often cannot sort out what caused a crash that several people are reporting. I sure have seen a lot of "remove all vestiges of plugins that were built with an earlier SDK’ or from alpha build it yourself code.
I think we can all improve. But we have to be able to talk to each other. This here is a good thing. I hope it does not disappear.
@ Vega Appreciate your points and it’s very obvious to me that you were interpreting sympathetically.
Thank you, I appreciate it - to a couple of your points:
Paying for the VST is literally paying to ensure VCV is a going concern into the future. The vast and overwhelming majority of what we have in VCV is out of Andrew’s and every single plugin dev’s generosity. The paid stuff is (I assume at least) the way of making sure that generosity can continue. In a world where so much music software is fairly prohibitively expensive, most of VCV and it’s third party plugins is free of charge. Huge and massive respect to all who have made that a possibility. They are royalty in my eyes.
“These resources” don’t exist in one place such that they could be offered as far as I’m aware. There’s much work that could be done here and Andrew’s aware of the issues. That comes back to my comment about testers. It probably is a little harder to find for our newer dev’s. Though I’m fairly sure I have offered to test for you before (be that as it may). You’re right though - many might not have specific DSP knowledge, but they can at least catch the less technical stuff. If you actually have questions about aliasing - let me point you in the direction of @Squinky for all your aliasing needs. Andrew has taken on Richie Hindle to do support and that is starting to bear fruit. Further to that, Andrew has answered many dev questions himself, such as he has time to do so.
Finally, thanks for being considerate in stating that you are largely in support of the business model, I know it’s not easy atm.
@Aria_Salvatrice, I’m truly sorry you had such a painful experience with VCV and the forum community here last October. I find your modules endlessly inspiring and I’m glad that you’re finding ways to keep exploring the musical and design spaces where you have so incredibly much to contribute. If you’re going to be on this forum again from time to time, welcome back; if you’re just dropping in, all the best to you, and I really can’t wait to see what you do next.
To those gathered here near the VCV branch and the official forum, let’s all be as welcoming and considerate and kind and understanding as we can to everyone who finds themselves here with us. This thread has shown that the V2 release hasn’t resolved some deep-seated differences in the community–and how could it have?–but I for one don’t think they’re beyond healing. Music, and the lives of many musicians, will be considerably better if we’re all better to each other.
@k-chaffin I could be wrong but to the best of my knowledge zero percent of the VST crashes (or any other crashes as far as I’m aware) have been due to illegitimate third party clones.
Further to that, illegitimate third party clones are discouraged and not allowed on the library so VST users in particular are unlikely to have their hands on them.
I’m largely in support of the business model too, but I agree it would be great if, particularly in the medium to long term, some way could be found to financially benefit the devs of free plugins. Vega’s idea for investing in better documentation and testing facilities is a good one.
btw I want to give a shout out to @cschol here as I notice he has been proactively trawling Github and contacting devs about issues with their plugins before they are submitted to the library - that kind of thing is very helpful indeed.
@Aria_Salvatrice I couldn’t second @gc3 words more heartily. Your modules AND your documentation were stellar. I’m sad you felt like your work had to be twice as good as everyone else’s to compete, and I’m sad you didn’t and don’t feel welcome. I would love to see the day that VCV can include your plugin again with you working on it!
A couple of points if I may:
The initial rule that you took issue with (the policy stating that if plugins go stale they can be adopted by anyone willing to update the code yet keeping the same name and look and feel and functionality) has been removed. Plugins need to be formally transferred and adopted now.
Andrew has stated that any crash with VCV VST is guaranteed support from the VCV support team as it’s a paid product. This covers crashes that are due to third party plugins. Users of free products can post support requests there too but they aren’t guaranteed. The support staff have already assisted some devs of third party plugins that were the cause of the VST crashing. The caveat is that support is a little overwhelmed right now but that’s to be expected of any software company right after a major release.
I want our community to be a stronger more diverse place. Can I explain a little about myself? Excuse the indulgence. When I started with VCV I had very little music hardware. The possibilities VCV opened up to the users even back then for the grand total of $0 was and still is a phenomenally attractive deal. I want more devs and more users to enjoy that deal. I do not pretend to understand your difficulties but I would like to. I want this to be a more diverse and empathetic community. Our flawed little community is worse off with your absence. If I can possibly help make this a reality let me know. Either way I wish you all the best in your future endeavours and hope that your obvious skill with musical tools, code and art can be realised.
@k-chaffin couldn’t agree more that it’s definitely a complex ecosystem now if it wasn’t before - just wanted to clarify that illegitimate third clones are not in my understanding why that is true. It’s definitely complex though.
Ultimately module devs aren’t getting paid because the community isn’t willing to pay for their work.
VCV Rack Library isn’t a paywall that is separating users from module devs, quite the contrary in fact. It’s a platform and a tool to distribute plugins to VCV Rack users, paid or not. Absolutely nobody would find your plugins if it wasn’t there.
Two cents from a plugin dev with 14k downloads and 1 donation.
