look ableton is doing it.
i guess they want notoriety
think what you could do with that og screen!
but youd better watch out, the users may make something that surpasses your own work! 
but thats the idea! let some talent in there, be a good sport! eventually someone will come fi ya
but ask yourself if you want a piece of that
open the whole line up. what do you think would happen to sales? i bet you would see a boom. and reputation? that would go way up too. it would be a constant refinement process until your units become very sought after. i think its a trickle now compared to what it could become. the air of āthis is something specialā would surround your trackers in no time.
what do you think, polyend?
Gets my vote. Synthstrom Deluge did it and it and the community firmware has been an incredible success.
I donāt think this could ever work - unfortunately. The OG tracker certainly runs on a subset of the code that runs on the Mini and Plus. If the original tracker didnāt have any successors that would have been a much more reasonable option.
it could work. even if only the hardware was unlocked. and personally i dont think anyone would run away with the āipā and release a competing product. trackers from the past were all built on each other anyway. the only thing that might happen is that nobody would use the stock polyend firmware ever again and the utility would go way up. this would be such a win for polyend honestly!
Ableton didnāt make the Move open source. They used a raspberry pi compute module 4 for the hardware which people have already used for making diy audio projects. The Move was hacked using the handshake system the Move utilizes while connecting to the Move Manager. Kind of similar to how the Wii was hacked years ago. I still have yet to see an official response from Ableton regarding Move Everything, but I do have it loaded on my Move. Been using it since before the hype, and not only use it every day, but it is literally the only reason I didnāt sell the Move. I agree that an open sourced Polyend playground would be tits, but man, thatās got to be hard giving away the keys to your baby.
Also, on a side note, do you currently do any work with DSP, or any form of coding, or anything outside of just playing with gear? Or are you just banking on someone else with skills to turn something youāre unhappy with into something that you want? Or are you just venting?
I Hope you donāt take that the wrong way, Iām just genuinely curious as Iām currently trying to learn programming with teensy and daisy seed boards. Just making something open sourced doesnāt necessarily fix or change anything. I even suggested the same thing when I first bought the OG tracker back when it was still ānewā. But that was before I even bothered trying to learn how things actually work. Now that I have a greater understanding of how things work, Iām just grateful theyāre still working on things because I sure as hell canāt make them better.
fine so they didnt but if someone hacked tracker we would all love it. please someone hack this thing
im a little pissed that polyend keeps it so dumb. you cant even count on basic features like a restarting lfo which to me is essential for writing basslines. and the point is there is nothing said about it in any written description (so to me its broken), and its really hard to tell how tf it works until something you wrote goes wonky and sounds amateur. i wont buy any synth that doesnt have a restarting lfo. i feel as if im being coralled into buying another product when its such a small easy detail, presumably an easy fix and something simple like that has to have a majority of votes and we need to wait literally years for the possibility. ahead of it is different color schemes! which might be nice but a restarting lfo is musically useful! critical in my case. i dont really want to go outside of tracker to make a bassline when its so damn close to usable. i actually love wavetables and using the wavetable oscillator. it sounds great in context so its really a pain when some amateur detail ruins your bassline and not even in any predictable way.
someone hack this thing please!
but truthfully i own a few hacked gears and they offer a massive advantage and stay in my collection of favorite kit, surviving the purge again and again.
i am also slightly autistic and suffer from issues. thats probably what you were after. 
i actually considered buying the move now theres a hack but im not certain about that. it seems intriguing but im a reformed gas addict
Iāve been coding audio tools and systems for a long, long time - Commodore 64, NES, Gameboy, Megadrive, SNES, N64, Gamecube etc. I even made a few trackers on the NES. Iāve also worked on audio tools for Arduino and Teensy, Max, Supercollider, Pure Data etc. etc. Experience in assembly, DSP, Javascript, Python, C++, Lua
I guess my point is, with no offence intended, is donāt be too quick to judge how useful making the firmware open source could (and would) be based on your own experience. Providing of course there was a reasonable toolchain/compilers to actually enable you to build the firmware it would be an incredible step forward.
Sweet. Thatās genuinely pretty cool and exactly why I asked. I personally could not improve apon anything at my current coding level apart from ā a verbal recommendation to someone that knows what they are doingā point of approach.
I personally love everything that open source is and represents. Like I said, one of my first posts on Backstage was basically the exact same post, but when I suggested it, I had nothing to really contribute other than that idea of it being open sourced. So I was, in fact, a skilless complainer. Now, years later, I still have nothing to contribute; but I have at least taught myself just enough to get into trouble, appreciate what others are doing, and be much more humble when approaching the subject.
I guess I was just trying to figure out which side you were on. Skilled/useful vs clueless/whiner. Iām fully comfortable admitting that Iām a clueless complainer most of the time.
Thatās awesome that you might actually be able to do something to contribute. I certainly wasnāt suggesting anything against it being open sourced. I was just saying I could understand how it would be difficult to let go of something as a creator. If it were mine, I would of passed it off years ago because Iāve seen the power, and accept that no matter what I do or know, thereās always room for external improvements. Iāve seen so many great ideas, businesses, and products go to shit over ego, or not being able to let someone else take the reigns for a minute.
So yeah, go team open source, I hope they do it and I hope you do something dope so I can come back and give some props.
I think this is a case of ābuild it (release open firmware) and they will comeā, similar to Deluge, but agree a proper toolchain would be nice to do anything actually useful. Iād personally love to be able to tinker with the Play+ firmware and build on top of whatās already there.
Iām assuming the microprocessor is an off the shelf type of deal (similar to Teensy) with an already existing toolchain/compiler etc?
This would bring me backā¦
i gotta say even tho i wish some uberlords would hijack this thing and take it where no tracker has gone before, i still love it. theres a reason the og or the + looks like a good candidate for a hack. most of that is the hardware. but i have decided to pair my m8 headless, since og has 4 dedicated midi trax, it almost begs to be used this way. m8 has all the restarting lfos i need honestly. and although i wish it was one machine i guess the + has me covered if that becomes more important.
the og is a great way to get into tracking and wavetables and simple granular synthesis. these things are expressive in their simplicity. there is room for certain āsubtletyā in the wavetable or granular playback. this is in fact a charming unit on its own all things considered.
While that would be great, it was a lot of work for Synthstrom to get to point where the community could become a reality, and they had no products to be cannibalized, are a very small company, and Rohan was burned out and didnāt want to work on it anymore. So yes, it has been a success (apart from the huge mess of the past year with the 1.3 changes that created a lot of instability and have demotivated a lot of the contributors, it seems - in particular, Sean, the open source manager and (in the past) main contributor, got similarly burned out). But its not free and itās what they, as a small collective, wanted as individuals.
(Note: I donāt know any of them, just have followed the project since its inception and this is my understanding of it).
If you want an open source tracker, why not just get a picoTracker Advance? picoTracker Advance ā xiphonics
because screen and real estate.
