I think it's a shame that this is targetted at the hacker-musician community, but the development environment is almost Windows only. (Written in C#, partially working under Mono on OS X, not tested under Linux.)<p>I suspect the vast majority of musician-hacker types don't use Windows.<p>Edit: I see that the Linux version is mostly held back by a third-party Windows-only tool, and a cross-platform replacement is under development. Awesome.
I was super excited about this until I saw the price tag. $300 definitely puts it into that "I'm gonna think 2x about buying this" categories. Not to say I wouldn't drop the cash if musicians I respect like it and use it.
Will there be an option to order the hardware pre-built? I'd love to hack on some effects, but my resources are a little thin for putting together the hardware side of things at present.
Whilst I applaud the effort, I think there needs to be PCB layouts and the like before this can be considered open source. At the moment the source code is there, and probably enough resources to give you a jump start on building your own, not detailed enough to build your own.<p>It's like me calling a program open source and ownly making the roadmap/initial spec publicly available.
I have been waiting for this device for ten years! This is great.<p>But my experience with digital effects processors in the audio domain, both guitar and recording gear, is the gear's AD and DA converters are super important. The software and digital side is important too, but if those 44kHz, 20 bit converters do a poor job, the units audio will subtly suffer, and emotional content from the playing will be masked.<p>There's a huge difference in sound quality of digital units on the market.<p>I'm hoping with the nature of the unit, that I would get very high quality components across the board. Seeing as every patch developed is dependent on that quality, and that I'd probably buy only one of these, and that I'm willing to spend more than on a normal, non-programmable pedal, then the unit better be seriously high performing.<p>High quality balanced +4dBu line level ins and outs on a rack unit version of these. That would be the next unit to do. Or even AES/EBU digital ins and outs and a wordclock in!
This is also available from Line 6, in a slightly different fashion. Line 6's solution would require more DSP programming knowledge. Open stomp looks analogous to a hardware version of Native Instruments Reaktor.<p>more info here:
<a href="http://line6.com/tcddk/" rel="nofollow">http://line6.com/tcddk/</a>
Great to see the musician/hacker community is alive and well. I would like to see an tablet app for Rakarrak myself.
<a href="http://rakarrack.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://rakarrack.sourceforge.net/</a>
I'm reminded of an Arduino-powered pedal on Instructables: <a href="http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Guitar-Pedal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Guitar-Pedal/</a>
Those who are sad it is windows based might be interested in resurrecting Justin Frankel's <a href="http://www.cockos.com/jesusonic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cockos.com/jesusonic/</a>
As a musician/developer who programs in Windows primarily and Linux only when I have too, this appeals to me. The price tag doesn't appeal to me however.