Why are we fighting with apple and Steinberg to get stuff working all the time ?
Jules et all why not build a high quality audio interface which doubles as a USB hub and midi hub .I t would connect to the computer multiple ways if you really wanted to like ethernet, blutooth, USB , thunderbolt etc … It would be class compliant and show up as a VST instrument if you wanted. It could have an open source browser based software that has a scripting language that allowed DSP and midi programming. It would work without the computer if you wanted to do that.
A real home for your Soul language which you actually have total control over.
That’s the type of box that might not end up as landfill so fast.
Save a few bears up in the arctic circle while you are at it.
Sean
It’s amazing that no product exists which is a standalone box with USB input and stereo balanced 1/4 audio in and out , a decent DAC/ADC with an arduino inside. Something similar to this that a muso can just program or is open source and can run other peoples stuff on …
https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/boards/hifiberry-dac-adc/
Arduino couldn’t really do much in terms of audio DSP…
I see ! I tried a bela . It couldn’t cope with much DSP and the whole thing wasn’t shielded properly and incredibly noisy.
Bela actually has a relatively beefy ARM processor. Arduino doesn’t have even that, it has just a microcontroller and an extremely small amount of RAM.
Yep, that’s exactly the kind of thing that SOUL will be aiming for! Whether we make such a box ourselves or someone else does is yet to be determined, but it’s certainly the kind of product we want to enable.
How much would you be willing to pay for a box like this Sean?
For two channels?
For eight channels?
For sixteen channels?
Hi Antoine,
I ideally I would like a couple of midi inputs, 4 usb inputs, 2-4 stereo inputs, 2 stereo output. USB and thunderbolt and ethernet out. If the DAC was close in quality to an apogee duet and could run at least 48/24 I would be happy. I would also want a button or 2 to scroll through patches on the unit and a couple of volume knobs just for the output. I have been toying with the idea of trying to build something like that with a rasberry pi … I still use my old motu ultralite firewire live because it is very stable and I think it helps having the audio and a midi channel away from the USB which is always buggy especially with lots connected. I also still use my nord modular G2X synths live. I use the rack for effects processing and synthesis and the keyboard version for synthesis. It’s rock solid too always turns on quickly and very little jitter etc feels very nice to play. The computer based oscillators etc all sound way better but it involves so many cables and hassle and bugs … If the box really did everything and you could really program it and had a great DAC it would be worth at $1000 to me.
This looks like it would be more powerful system than the bela .
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN,
https://www.hifiberry.com/products/dacplus/
I bet you that is a way faster processor than what is in say my nord modular G2X …
Is that really not fast enough to run CPU expensive filters and fast fourier transform processing at 48khz /24 bit ?
It’s all so cheap. Less than $100
https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/bundles/dac-bundle/
I suppose a big reason is that a huge amount of software already exists for those systems. (Microsoft and Apple operating systems, plugins based on VST…) There’s a ton of friction involved against anything that doesn’t keep those things working and easily integrated in the workflow.
How many filters? How many FFT-based processes? Is it worth the trouble of dealing with an additional hardware box? And next year there will better Intel and AMD CPUs available anyway…
Knowing me there would never be enough filters of FFT based processes 
Something that would simplify the amount of unreliable stuff I lug around and plug in would be a great help. The reason why I started this thread is I started trying to build a midi plugin and VST3 and JUCE aren’t working. I keep thinking about how clunky it is dealing with so many bits of gear clamped together all the time.
If your goal is live-playing, you can probably forget FFT-based stuff. Those tend to have latencies that are inherent to the processing itself and external hardware boxes are not going to help it.
“VST3 and JUCE aren’t working” is not the right way to think about the problem you’re having.
Every problem in code has an error message.
Every error message has a solution.
There are 10s, if not hundreds, of developers on here who have released VST2 and VST3 plugins, written entirely in JUCE.
Thanks matkat I have built 4 or 5 in JUCE before but can’t get VST3 to work and VST2 looks like it has been discontinued .
.
Are you able to build new midi only plugins in VST3 using the latest JUCE build?
It’s a constant issue the shifting sand of updated hardware and software OSX, Windows, VST, AU, Iphone .
Now that moore’s law seems to be over and CPU speed is pretty enormous and cheap to build it would be awesome if the hardware and OS could become a static thing for a while.
Sean