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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the every-kickstarter-project-should-impress-like-this dept.

Jono Bacon reports via OpenSource.com

It runs Linux, uses JACK, and the plugin standard used is LV2

Some time ago, the MOD Duo jumped onto my radar. In a nutshell, it is a guitar stomp box that comes loaded with different effects and sounds. Instead of buying the multitude of guitar pedals that many musicians string together in complex, if somewhat beautiful ways, the MOD Duo negates all that. It is a single box and what's more, it is powered by open source.

Now, when I say it is powered by open source, I don't just mean it runs Linux, but we will get to that a little later.

[...] Inside the beefy-looking steel enclosure is a computer that is loaded with software for generating lots of different guitar effects and sounds. This includes delays, reverbs, choruses, flangers, and more. When you plug this thing into you computer, you can then use a web interface to build your own virtual pedalboard:

Just like a physical pedalboard, you drag the different virtual stomp boxes onto the floor and use cables to connect them together in different ways.

When you have created your sounds, the MOD Duo will save them and you can call them directly from the hardware unit. This means you don't need a computer to use the MOD Duo to play gigs; you only use the computer to configure your pedalboards.

The interface is not just used for creating sounds, though. You can also browse additional virtual pedals and download them, and create banks of patches.

[...] For many years you have been able to plug a USB sound card into a Linux computer, set up JACK, configure your plugins, and output the audio in different ways. Although possible, this was historically complicated to set up and use.

[...] The MOD Duo changed all this. First, everything is set up and good to go on the device itself. You literally don't need to know jack about JACK. Second, the plugins have completely refreshed and simplified interfaces that look and feel like guitar pedals. Third, the overall interface for stringing these different effects together is simple, natural, and a lot of fun. For the geeks they even go so far as to offer a MOD Arduino Shield for experimenting with different sensors and a MOD software development kit.

[...] Aside from all the technical merits of the MOD Duo from an open source perspective, I also love how the team is working in this very community-oriented way. Once again, the real power of open source is not code, it is the community fabric and methodology that underpins it.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @06:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @06:44PM (#421347)

    I'm being serious here. I'm genuinly curious, as someone with absolutely no training in electric guitars and related toys, but with a PhD in physics.

    There's a difference between solving a nonlinear equation numerically, and actually measuring a physical process described by that equation.
    My understanding is that with electric guitars people routinely use the nonlinear regimes of amplifiers, so I actually am curious to know if using digital signal processing is actually good enough.

    I certainly agree that a CD can sound just as good as a vinil recording, possibly better, but that's a recording, not the actual generation of the sounds themselves. For instance someone is saying in another comment that their digital amplifier thingie is not strong enough for some tasks. This would never be a problem with an analog system, where "failure" would actually mean circuits burning, not a CPU failing to keep up.