The future of SOUL IDE

One step at a time - that announcement proves ROLI still exists… :slight_smile:

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@brxa Any news?

@jules has been working on some top-secret stuff that may or may not be related to SOUL.
He might reveal more about it in March.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W00e9-LAmmc

Hi, last time I talked to Jules it was on November. He talked about great news - I was expecting that in time for the Winter NAMM (before it was canceled).

From the video posted by @ryanblock it seems the good news are coming next month (March 2022). And it seems it’s about SOUL indeed.

Just a side note :
A few hours ago, Intel Corp. published some extraordinary news (also) about its “soft-core” approach. Also if it was clear and predictable (no big surprises), it’s the first time a IC Company makes such kind of announcements “to the wide public”.

The direct consequence is : the rise of the FPGA as a “central” component (coprocessor) inside any workstation, finally starting the long awaited “widespread” heterogeneous computing (HC) era.

…At least I read it that way :slight_smile:

And (on the pro audio side) SOUL is naturally born for such heterogeneous computing. Things seem to move finally, let’s hope the entire industry will proceed in that direction…

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Can you paste any link?

Is this perhaps the announcement Jules has been waiting for? SOUL is a natural fit, so this may be the curtains rising on a new era for pro audio!

The announcement :

It has to be “interpreted” : to sum up basically, the strong interest Intel has on RISC-V (among the other ISAs) will be in the form of a virtual, Nios V soft-core processor, running on FPGAs.

This kind of announcements is getting more and more “widespread” over time. I don’t think the SOUL team is waiting for a specific announcement : if you start a project like SOUL is because of your long-term seight on computer science and heterogeneous computing is the future.

Audio on hybrid low-latency architectures ? Have a look at the FAST project

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Yes, the FAST project seems similar indeed, since it is a specific use (FPGA) of Grame’s Faust.

I’m waiting for SOUL because it is not specifically for FPGAs. SOUL runs on a software driver, which is written to run on a CPU, or DSP, or GPU, or ASIC, or FPGA, or…

This hardware-independent approach determines the big deal. The first (SOUL, or FAST, or any other…) to pass the prototyping stage and to include a full IDE (also for GUI development) plus a large ecosystem of drivers will be the game winner.

Veeery exciting matter :slight_smile:

hmm, SOUL is a procedural language, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I believe functional languages like FAUST which are more explicit about how the signal ‘flows’ through the circuit are a more natural fit for an FGPA.

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Also if the FPGA thing will be a big deal, for now I will be very happy to see something like SOUL entering the arena (also running on a CPU).

This would mean : deploy a software once and run it on any system (running a specific SOUL driver). Today there are tons of Plugin formats, ISAs and OSes. Really too many.

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No news so far from Jules and the SOUL Team…

If they don’t break the silence within the next few months, I’ll may be tempted to seriously consider to be a little bit disappointed.

Jules confirmed that there is something to announce and said probably March so it can’t be that long now… I hope! Cause I am thinking of investing my time into Rust.

Probably on April Fool’s Day. :partying_face:

Lack of transparency does not inspire confidence in the future of the project. The repo hasn’t had a commit in almost a year.

Yes, it’s taken ages but Ces and I will finally be able to announce what we’re up to in a few days!

Hmm, just to clarify our position here:

Ces and I resigned from ROLI a year ago and that was the last time we had any contact with anyone at that company. The work we did on SOUL belongs to ROLI, and it was never our place to comment on what they choose to do (or not do) with it. Maybe they had other things to worry about last year…

However, if you liked the direction we were trying to take things in with SOUL, keep a look out for our new stuff, as we still believe those general principles are the future for DSP coding :slight_smile:

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Great ! I can’t wait to hear the news :slight_smile:

So, I assume the name “SOUL” is now definitely gone (since it’s property of ROLI).

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Well, technically, the terms of the EULA allow anyone to use the name “SOUL”. So any random third party could write their own implementation using all the public code, and call it SOUL quite legally.

But for our own plans: no, we’ll certainly stay well clear of that name.

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So you don’t have confidence in a new project that we haven’t even announced, where you don’t have a clue what it’s about…? Maybe jumping to conclusions a bit quickly there!

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:man_facepalming: i see hordes of happy people jumping from one project to the next…

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