Re: Looper development and production costs?

[Matthias Grob <matthias@grob.org>]

Bruce says:
>but does the edp need to be redesigned from scratch?  aren't we talking
>about additions to a product that already works extremelly well?

Andy answers:
>  Unfortunately, yes.

But he is talking of the HW only. But the SW could be recycled to a 
considerable extent. Inicially a new HW  with some of the extensions 
discussed below would run the slightly modified old soft for stereo 
and simultaneous playback of the several loops (NextLoop would turn 
into "NextTrack" or so and there would be one more button... :-).
I guess the end price would turn out similar to the present model, 
would that be acceptable?

Jim lists:
>- don't go againinator
>- digital i/o

s/pdif? USB? FireWire?

>- balanced analog i/o

what for? I would rather like the jacks to be stereo. I hate to 
connect two cables and keep modifying all of my equipment for stereo 
cables... The line ins of my small Mackie are L/Mono - R/Stereo - 
without any loss or cost, just an hour of work :-)

>- stereo

certainly

>- expandable memory.

certainly, actual SIMMs or flash card (more expensive!)?

>- flash os

yes

>- variable sample rates (lo-fi up to high res)

what for? once RAM is sufficiently cheap?
One thing I think a lot about: To maintain Brother compatibility with 
the old EDPs, it would be interesting to keep the clock at 41k. I 
dont think this rate seriously affects sound quality.
But for further compatibility, we would have to have 44.1kHz, too... 
another parameter?

>here's an idea: if gibson is not interested, why not have an open 
>source design project?
>i think enough people would be interested in the project to make it 
>happen.
>and then when the design work was done (an interesting term in open 
>source, i know),
>gibson could run with it...

The design is not owned by Gibson and the licence is not exclusive, 
but quite some money and structure to develop and distribute is 
needed...
Do you suggest that this effort would be made by the community, too?

The present structure of the soft would hardly allow an open source 
design and I would not be willing to give away 8 years of work for 
which I did not get back yet what I put into it... I mayb e wrong...
But as we worked up to now, quite some user wishes have been 
implemented and this could grow further.
Once the upgrade is done, for example, I could imagine to assemble 
personal EPROMs with special variations of the functions for a 
reasonable money.


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