Re: very special floor-based looper

[Jeffrey Larson <jeff@zonemobius.com>]

 > I thought I recall reading somewhere that the Receptor would not run
 > free VSTs, but only purchased or whoever they worked with on
 > integration.

The Receptor is basically a Linux PC with a few OS modifications to
make it boot faster into their custom VST host application.  It
uses some sort of "virtualization" technology to run Windows DLLs.

I haven't looked at it in detail but if you write the plugin
so that it only uses the VST and VSTGUI libraries and doesn't make
any unusual calls to the Windows OS (managing its own threads,
opening devices, touching files) then the plugins may work.  I would
imagine that the vast sea of plugins built in Synthedit will work which
is probably why they can claim to support "the majority" of 3rd party
plugins.

Unfortunately many plugins don't follow these rules and they have
to be ported.  Mobius is one of these.

 > My opinion...this is totally asinine, if true, and folks
 > should storm the Bastille to change it. :)

Yes, on the surface this sounds like a supremely dumb design choice.
Build a device that can only run Windows DLLs, but doesn't actually
run Windows, so developers have yet another platform to support.  I
hope there were good reasons for doing this, perhaps it is difficult
to make Windows run well on hardware like this, maybe there were
licensing issues.  I'm sure there were OS modifications they could do
to Linux to make it more reliable that could never be done to Windows.

The Open Labs people seem to have solved these problems, from what
I've ready it's basically a Windows PC wrapped in a synth-like case.
But they've got more surface area for a screen and a keyboard, so that
probably makes it easier.

Jeff