These days I was thinking about this conversation because I got an Ableton Move motivated by… Schwung. It’s incredible what a group of organized volunteer open source developers are doing with just a little door that Ableton left open. And it’s all about the “hackability” of the Move hardware and firmware, which is not open source. I don’t know how much extra work this hackability has created and creates for Ableton but it doesn’t look like much? Clearly the responbility of keeping a device functional and usable lies on the user and Schwung, not on Ableton. Yesterday Ableton released a new version that breaks the Schwung installation (a known fact) bt this is just an annoyance that is easily fixed with the Schwung installer (which runs on Linux, iOS and Windows). Also, the Schwung layer and the official Move layer can coexist, getting the best of both worlds. Schwung also offers some “takeover” modules that turn the same hardware into a different product. Very impressive, and it is becoming hard to ignore even by the regular youtubers covering “mainstream” Ableton stuff. The whole hack is so well done and so easy to use by non-tech users.
Ok, and now to my point. From a hardware perspective, the Polyend Synth, Play/Play+, and Tracker/Tracker+/Mini are not that different than an Ableton Move: a bunch of good pads, generic and specifc knobs, buttons, a display, and a processor inside. What I have no idea about is how capable are the Polyend devices’ processors and their architecture to allow for the same type of hackability and performance. Apparently the Move runs on an RPi 4 Compute Module and that allows for the whole Schwung hack. I have no idea what would be the situation for Polyend devices (i.e. the Polyend Synth or the Play+).
Introducing Polyend Keys has just been announced with an open source firmware, which will bring more first-hand experience for Polyend in the “hackability” area. 