TALK 914 - Firmware Hacking

Hello everybody, this is a disembodied me because I'm not really here, I'm currently

in China, just before the Beijing Modular Show, which you will see videos coming back

from us, and then later on Music China, and in a sort of bizarre time travel kind of scenario,

we've got a guest who I'm going to be meeting in China, but will also be here before China,

this is, it's almost too much to kind of think, but we'll get onto that in a sec, I just wanted

to tell you, actually, yeah, coming up obviously, we've got, you will have seen Brooklyn Modular,

Brooklyn Synth and Pedal Expo this weekend, Matt's been over there recording, we've also

had, you will also have had a few exciting videos that came out yesterday, because Tuesday

the 20th of October seems to be the time that everybody wants to release stuff, so after

a quiet summer, we've just got a splurge of stuff, so you've probably got lots of things

to talk about, we're not talking about them, because this is a pre-record, do you see where

I'm getting? Anyway, I didn't really want to, I'm trying to make it kind of as obvious

as possible, we'll get onto that, so I'm going to run this as if we're a live show, it's

not a live show, so what I normally do now is play a little reminder to join us on, as

a member, incidentally, I'm going to be posting some travelogue stuff and some stuff behind

the scenes from China, which will be my sort of general experience, outside of all the

other videos, so if you want to hook up to those, you can join us as members, anyway,

back after this. Indeed, and so we're back in the room, and I want to welcome Gertz from

Erika Synth, who will have a little title here, in a bizarre twist, Gertz, you're going

to China tomorrow, in real time, obviously, and we'll meet there, because you're going

to be at Beijing Modular, have you been before? No, actually, this is my first proper Asia

trip, except Japan, where I've been a couple of times, but yes, I'm joining your split

personality stream. Yeah, it's weird, I've never been to China either, but I have been

to Japan a couple of times, so we're going to have a pretty much parallel experience,

I'd think, so if, like me, you end up sort of thinking, I can't eat any more wriggly

food, you know, I'll meet you somewhere, we can go and have a sandwich, or something kind

of normal, just to sort of decompress, so I'll make a date for you, I don't know how

adventurous your palate is, but I can't speak for, I can only speak for myself. No dogs,

no dogs for me. I think that's a thing of the past, I think that's something that doesn't

really happen anymore, but we must try and stop being stereotypical about it, I'm very

excited, it's going to be fun. Anyway, so really, the reason Gertz is here is because

we're talking, there's been a lot of talk about firmware hacking, and sort of the use

of AI for this thing has enabled this, but before we get on to kind of expanding on

that, I've also got Pauly, who's there in Birmingham, we did a show yesterday, so this

is a week, this will be out on, I think, October the 21st, I believe is the plan. How are you

Pauly? It hasn't been a week, it's only been a day, but I haven't seen you in ages, Nick,

how have you been? Yeah, good, thank you. I love it, no. My flight was fine. Really good,

yes, yeah, brilliant. I'm good, I'm going to the Conservatoire tomorrow to have another few

meetings and look around in Birmingham, just to start doing the joyful exercise of risk assessing

everything for our needs, because for everyone who isn't initiated, including Gertz, I'll explain,

we're going to run disability music workshops, so we have to make sure everything is safe,

essentially, and fit for purpose, and it's, I think it's quite an old historic building, so

we'll just see how it all works, and I'm sure there'll be workarounds and things like that,

so that's going to be fun, but yeah, it'll be nice, so that's me anyway. Excellent, well,

I could go to our three up, I mean, the reason we're here is we, Gertz actually reached out to

me via email a couple of days ago and said, what do you, what do you think about all this sort of

firmware hacking and the news, you know, because there was, we've got a few touch points to run

as rough topics, but essentially, I think Electron had recently said that they weren't allowing people

to talk, to post news about their firmware hacks, but there's all these other kind of things coming

out, lots of, it seems to be half, some of it is endorsed, some of it is open source, so it's okay,

some of it's for, for instruments and equipment that's been discontinued, so where does that

stand, but I mean, ultimately, it's a real thorny subject, what was it that triggered you

to sort of reach out, I mean, what was the kind of, the thing that made you want to talk about it?

We had a discussion in our, in our headquarters about this trend happening,

and two days ago, a day before yesterday, a support ticket was submitted that some of our

modular users improved our black sequencer, so that was actually after I reached you out,

and he added some features that kind of make sense, and so in generative mode,

which is this magic mode, so to make it more musical, and yeah, that was, that was after,

actually, I reached you out, but basically, yes, all this discussion about Electron gear being,

being improved, what it means for manufacturers, what it means for support, and how it can impact

industry in general, so I thought it would be a nice topic to discuss, actually. Excellent, well,

and that triggered me, I know, I need to have a filler show while I'm away for two weeks,

because of my terrible lack of planning, and it sort of popped into my lap, which is fantastic,

but those, immediately, those questions are really interesting, because I think one people,

you know, the, the, the, probably the end user is, why shouldn't I, I own it, I can be, I can do what

I like, but there have got to be a couple of factors that, that are, have to be considered,

and I guess the first one is, they have to decompile what you've done, which is your

own proprietary code, which is not, not designed, unless it's open source, to be modified, to be

picked apart, and to be improved upon, does that present problems in itself, or is that,

I guess it depends on manufacturer to manufacturer, right?

True, you see, the guys who do hacking, or let's say improvements on, on our, on instruments,

they do not have full picture, how the, how the instrument is designed, you know,

and of course, by help of AI, you can inject some bits and pieces in some parts of the firmware,

and so, but, but what are consequences of that, you know, does it, how it impact other parts of

the, of the firmware, you know, and functionality, that's, that nobody can tell, and, and,

and we agreed with our support guys that we cannot support cases like that, so the best

we can advise is just do factory research, and hope for the best, you know, that it goes back

to the original form. Oh, that's interesting, I mean, yeah, I hadn't really thought about that,

I mean, I suppose, and that, that support issue is one of the factors, because as we know, I mean,

certainly from software houses, and other people factoring in the amount of resources that have

to go into resource, into supporting a product, whether it be hardware or software, hopefully

hardware, none at all, because it's all perfect, and everything, your design is impeccable, and,

you know, there are no issues with hardware, there are no issues with firmware, and you can only do

so much, so it adds, what you're saying is, it adds a lot of extra, or could add a lot of extra

load onto a manufacturer, whether they be small or large enough to eat that extra load, right?

Correct, but yeah, that depends how a manufacturer approaches it, you know,

maybe the update is kind of nice, but imagine the amount of possible variations of

of those hacks that can pour in, and even responding to each inquiry takes some time,

yeah, so yes, yeah, so yeah, we decided that this is where is our, where our like red line is, that

okay, if people do something, and do some hacks that make the instrument more

like easy to use for specific creative intention, or something, then sure, do it, but

if something goes wrong, then our advice will be just do a factory reset, and that's it, you know,

because we cannot track, yeah, we have no resources of tracking all possible changes,

no, that's understandable, so is there, I mean, is there a possibility that something could

irrevocably brick a piece of software, a piece of hardware, or is there always that sort of

backstop, I mean, or can a system be designed so that, you know, whatever happens, you can always

re-flash it, and it'll be okay, I mean, is there, are there, or are there things that could be done

that would might, I'm not talking necessarily Erika since, but you may know, you know, that

this is a possibility. If a bootloader is somehow affected, then you cannot do firmware update in

normal way, just plugging a USB cord, or something, so you need a dedicated flash,

flasher device, or programming device, that reverts the firmware, so that's a worst case

scenario, and yeah, nobody knows, you know, how the code is impacted, and what happens, you know.

Oh, interesting, I hadn't thought about that. Have you got any questions about that,

Pauli, because I think it's, I'm well aware that I've got a big list, and we could easily,

I could easily dominate this, I mean, do you, I suppose the question, yeah,

one of the questions for me is, is it worth it, I suppose, you know, I don't know whether, because,

you know, there are sometimes firmware is released by the manufacturer that causes a problem as well,

and, you know, that these things do happen, they're not finite, you know, people can make

mistakes across all areas, hopefully the manufacturer knows what it's doing, you know, but

that can happen too.

It's a difficult one, isn't it, because the, I feel, you know, I wrote an article about this

the other week, about firmware hacking, the great debate on whether companies should embrace this,

or whether they should try and protect their, you know, protect their work and stuff like that,

and how is that going to be seen by the community if some companies go,

you know, have at it, the floodgates are open, and if some manufacturers don't,

and the thing that concerns me is that there doesn't seem to be,

a particularly nice reasoning behind it, or a particularly kind reasoning behind it.

I feel it's all what I'd call a bit edgelord, and what I mean by that is,

in the responses to my article, I saw a lot of people saying things like, you know,

they've been keeping things from us for years, they've been keeping features from us for years,

you know, like a conspiracy or something like that, and people almost kind of were happy to,

are happy to see synth companies burn, you know, because they've kept things away from us for years,

away from us for years, and I think it's, I mean, to be polite, I think it's short-sighted,

because we've just got these tools which allow for things like rapid decompilation of

binaries, and allow you to inject kind of custom coding and stuff, so that, you know,

lots of people can alter hardware in a way that wasn't possible before,

but we all need to remember that that wasn't the world a year ago, two years ago, and that

when these companies, ErikaSynths, Electron, were creating these things, DSP was something that,

and it still is if you want good DSP, something you have to pay for, you have to pay

a programmer money to develop features, and also, here's the other thing, you have to make

sure the UI makes sense. I find that some of these community firmwares overstuff,

they overstuff the UI, right, so they put too many features in, so it's tricky to find,

and also it has to be stable, a manufacturer has to create a stable black box, whereas these

people who create custom firmwares, you know, don't have to do that, and I think, you know,

potentially there are different ways that companies can respond to this. Firstly,

they could lock the hardware the hell down using things like crypto tips, you know,

like trusted platform modules, which are little encoded, 72-bit encoded chips, I think they cost

about, if you buy them in bulk, like about a dollar, it doesn't add much to the price of the

synth, and that means only properly signed code can even run on the hardware, or the other way,

do manufacturers go, right, well, either we create, either we put an analog component,

like a filter or something, on every module to make something that can't be kind of cloned by AI,

or do we just put, like Korg does with their SDK, do we put an open source little playground,

fenced-off playground in every product now, just to satiate that kind of hacking spirit,

and would that allow the manufacturers and the community to kind of find,

you know, a customised, yeah, that's really interesting, a walled garden, if you will,

yeah, that's really interesting, I mean, does this, Gerts, does this make you think about ways

that your hardware could be designed so that it is more bulletproof, or, you know, what,

going forward, is this something that you incorporate, you think about incorporating

into further future products on how to combat this, or you just, hands off, it's over to you,

we have to stay at our position, do whatever you like, but you can't, you can't come back

on us because, you know, it's just, we can't possibly support it? Most of our hardware

is partly bulletproof because it is all analogue or hybrid, like 70% of things is analogue,

but I 100% agree with Pauli's point about user interface and user experience when operating the

instrument, so I love to quote Napoleon that, and we actually approach it, we use this approach in

our user interface development, that he said that the essence of strategy is sacrifice,

meaning that you put aside features that are nice to have, but that are, that make user interface

more complicated, user experience is not there anymore, and so, and you cannot imagine how many

features we set aside when developing an instrument, and of course, there is so much to add

to the instrument, and to make it more capable, of course, to the limit of computing power it has,

or DSP processing capabilities, you know, that's also a question, you know, you can add

some new features, but the processor simply cannot do all computations in that, yeah,

exactly, exactly, so then you overclock it or something, you know, so yeah, these are all

things like a technical perspective, but like my favorite thing is really what you sacrifice in

order to have this nice experience when using instruments, and that's where Erika's things

somehow excel, you know, our sequencers, I'm really, I'm genuinely proud of what we do in terms of

user experience, user interfaces, and adding something to that, yeah, that's actually

fascinating, and I totally get that, because also it's the vision of the company, and then

somebody else will come along, I guess, hold that thought there, and I do have the business of

sponsors for the show to include, so we'll be back shortly, just after this,

excellent, so sorry, Paul, I think you wanted to come in there, and I think that curated sort of

noticed that sense, and a loss of control of that is quite an important point, I think,

yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna just mention an ErikaSynths product, I think gets it absolutely

bang on, this isn't an advert, by the way, I just genuinely love it, and that's the

Percon's voice Eurorack module, because it's got such a range of different digital synthesis types,

but they're all just kept in a UI, which is just so tweakable, that I'm sure they could

have put even more algorithms and stuff in the Percon's, you know, than, and completely overstuff

it if they wanted, but the, it's just the kind of perfect amount of controls and CV, just to,

you know, keep it intuitive, basically, so yeah, I was just going to point that out as a highlight

for me of ErikaSynths design, to balance out this unexpected advertising, I'm wearing a

Shachmat modular t-shirt, so, okay, well, here's a thought, here's a, so, so, I mean, in the same

way that, I mean, it's really interesting that, you know, coming back to Korg, as you mentioned,

they've all, you know, their foresight, in a way, I mean, I think maybe accidental, or possibly

planned, is really fascinating, but as a result, we're still not, I mean, I'm not getting tons of

press releases about people who are writing vibe-coded SDK kind of thing, you'd, I know you

did one for the, the Drumlog, but it's interesting that building extra spare capacity into future

hardware, so that there is the potential, if you're a machine-based thing, so you say, okay,

if you load this into it, you know, these are the parameters you get, do you think there's a future

in terms of the way you build things, like, you know, you're, so that there's a little bit of

spare capacity, I mean, are, or are, when you build, are you right up against the stops for

the chips, I mean, do you have certain amount of headroom, I mean, how do you approach this,

because, I mean, chips are expensive, you know, you can't just kind of go, oh, we'll make it twice

as powerful as it needs to be, because that'll cost a fortune, right, in the bond cost.

This is actually what we seriously reconsidered after

microprocessor crisis, which come during, came during the COVID, because back then we realized

that we literally used a unique microprocessor for every single module we had, because we selected

the microprocessor that is just enough for the task, you know, that's what Nicky was saying,

you know, so, of course, there is a lot of possibilities still to do some hacking,

but, yes, there is some threshold on what you can do with that, but then we, of course,

changed our approach, because we realized that that was, like, pure nightmare to manage

20 different microprocessors, you know, when you have shortage of every single one.

And then, yeah, we started, we started optimizing, and, of course, we have

more headroom in processing power now in our instruments currently,

but, yeah, still, as these vibe coders do not have full picture on what is hardware and what

like original firmware is running on the instrument, you know, it's always, it always

takes some risk. I suppose they wouldn't know, they wouldn't have the same tools to say, you know,

this is the CPU, it's running, you know, with this much headroom, you can't just do a top command

on the command line on your instruments and have that running. But I suppose, but that's what you

saying, by standardizing the DSP platform for a series of instruments or a particular, you know,

like for a couple of years, you've got the opportunity to buy in larger amounts, which

reduce the overall cost, which means that you can be more efficient in your build cost, and then

some instruments might have a bit more headroom than others, or some instruments might have a lot

of headroom because they don't need to use all that, but it makes developing easier. Do you think

there's, I mean, I guess that the other thing that's really hard is you could be completely

transparent, or a manufacturer could be completely transparent and go, this is how much we use,

you know, there's this much headroom, here's, maybe here are some tools so that if you do anything,

watch out for this number, because if it ever spikes above this, then it's going to be too much,

so almost making it easier for people to do that, I don't know, does that, or is that, that's

too much like the fact that the crown jewels, the family secrets, I mean, how does that, would that

work? Is that a naive approach? You see, we are having this discussion, you know, if we would

rewind like 100 years back, then this process, what we are witnessing now would take a decade,

I guess, but we are talking now months, you know, this first electron posts appeared like

three, four weeks ago or something, you know, so we actually have not, haven't had time actually to

consider this, so it's, it's just happening as we, as we see it, you know, and it's happening

in days, like we had our chat, I wrote you an email about this topic, and next day our

black sequencer was improved, and we didn't see it coming. Yeah, I suppose so, and again, yeah,

yeah, but, and again, that, that just illustrates how fast it is, and most good companies are

planning at least one or two years ahead with a sort of product roadmap, so that's it, so building

that kind of nimbleness into, into your direction forward is, I can't imagine that's, that's

particularly easy. Imagine there are, there are some business models that are

being, like, ruined at the moment, for instance, take, take the VST company, who makes a business

model in a way that we, we sell you a plugin, and then we consider selling some updates,

or some extra features, for instance, and that, that will not work anymore, and

and that's entire, and that's entire industry ruined, possibly.

Yeah, my, my, my friend, ex-colleague from advertising agency, he was a creative director

there, he's now in esoterics and in yoga, so he developed a synthesis, virtual synthesizer

for, that emulates those crystal balls that are used, and, or copper balls, you know,

in used in meditations. He had, he has zero, he has zero experience in, in coding, and in

basically music technology. He showed me nicely sounding VST instrument that, okay, okay, it

doesn't have integration with, with large platforms or so, so it's an app, but to integrate

it with, with, to make it a proper VST instrument, it's maybe just this much stretch, and, and it

will be there, you know. So, yeah, those developments are quite impressive, I must say.

But I suppose the thing is, is that the things that have their own proprietary technology in

their own specific synth engines, I mean, you know, we've seen UI hacks on various plugs,

you don't really see them on, you know, like the big stuff, the G4 stuff, the Arturia stuff,

the, I mean, whatever, you don't see people hacking like they used to with ResEdit, you know,

where you change the knobs and all this thing. I mean, it doesn't seem to be a thing, and I suppose

decompiling and recompiling VSTs, that's, I mean, do you think that's, well, you know, Paul, do you

think that's something that's going to happen next? I mean, I don't know if it's even viable,

because I guess the code must be locked down to a degree, I don't know.

It's, uh, from, from, obviously, there's things I can't talk about on podcasts, but from my

perspective, it's already happening.

Right.

It's already happening, and not just in our industry, and not just plugins, either. I saw

that someone had vibe coded, essentially, a completely feature-complete Adobe Suite

with Photoshop, Premiere thing, and it was using new code, but it was going for feature parity

kind of coding, where it's re-implementing new stuff. So, in my mind, it's literally already

happening, where people are, you know, decompiling things, re-compiling things.

Okay, well, here, but here's a thought, I mean, is that...

There was one, there was one, I...

Go, sorry, go, Paul, yeah.

There was one I saw, I've got an example, there was one I saw, um, just a few days ago,

where there's, um, an Ensoniq SQ80 plugin called, uh, SQ8L, and it's been 32-bit forever,

and it's a really good emulation, free emulation of the Ensoniq SQ80, which, of course, is quite

a classic synthesizer, and bam, in the last couple of days, there's been a 64-bit, uh,

binary created of it.

Okay.

By decompilation, so it's already happening.

I suppose my question is, if that, is that a bad thing? I mean, if we take the kind of,

the output of everybody who makes things, that the reason that Adobe and these other companies

got ahead is because they came up with unique ideas. If other people are building on that,

and moving forward, we see this all the time in other industries, we see it in DAWs,

where companies, you know, like, Cubase will introduce certain features that will then,

um, be emulated or adopted and improved, and then Studio One will do the same, and then,

you know, Ableton will do something, and all these things kind of move, there's always,

like, an arms race to a degree, and limiting it to just the three or four big software houses,

is that, is that okay? Should it, would it make sense to have wider periods of this,

and then it's, then it's just a question of if somebody at Steinberg, for instance,

saw what somebody had hacked on their DAW, they went, that's a great idea,

and they could implement it, and make sure it worked properly, and didn't break anything.

Is that bad? I mean, is that, is that a bad thing? I don't know. What, what, what do you think?

It's…

Anybody. That's odd, isn't it?

It's…

I suppose it's stealing, is it stealing code? Yeah, I guess.

I think, like anything, it could just be the removal of the, the middle,

from everything, you know, people who make things in the middle, and, and try and make a profit of

them. Maybe the big, big, big, big, huge companies will be able to, to take the, take the, the hit

of all of this competition. The, the, the, there's going to be a brand new low-end,

massive amount of low-end kind of, you know, people in their bedrooms creating

innovative products that can professionally compete now with stuff, and I think maybe

where it will suffer is the middle, and I think that happened in, in, in music as well, you know,

with the whole end of physical media, where we went into mp3s, and it had the same kind of

slightly edgelord approach. All information should be free, but when, but again, I feel it's

short-sighted, because when you say all information should be free, the, the bigger entities can,

can tank that hit, whereas the, the middling ones can't. Yeah, that's, that's my prediction.

And also, I guess we need to distinguish hardware companies and, and software companies, because

yes, in, in case of hardware companies, you still make, you make an instrument, you know, you have,

you have a hardware platform that is, that has certain features, and certain features can be

added, and so, but, and yeah, a company can intentionally make it. We had several, like,

attempts, actually, for, for modular, like this 4ms VC Iraq module, where you just import,

import, buy a bunch of VCV modules, and, and operate, yeah, exactly. So, that, I don't see

that, yeah, I don't see most, many of them succeeded, you know, they, they did some business,

but, but somehow, it's, this trend has not get, got, like, broad scale adoption. But in case of

software companies, it's, it's more, it's more, I'd say, painful for them, because somebody,

for instance, comes up with user interface. So, the VST has to look like this, you know,

it has to have this set of features, and then, if somebody, somebody just does everything, you know,

like, based on, like, vibe codes, based on that interface, you know, that's already

kind of copyright violation, and also software. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting.

Well, yeah, no, I agree, I mean, it's interesting, I've literally, this should be going out maybe

tomorrow, if you're watching the show now, as it were, not tomorrow, as in, anyway, you,

you know what I mean. We, I did an interview, I did a piece with the Natural Audio AL1,

which is a mastering limiter, high-end plug-in, you know, it's 299 bucks, yet,

they are selling by the bucket load, because it has a sound and a thing that people are responding

to, and they're, and they're doing extremely well, just word of mouth, just, so the notion that

larger companies only, only get to a certain point, it's not just about the, you know,

as in all industries, there's often, there's winners and losers, and people who make it,

and people who don't, so, I mean, I think it's, in a way, you know, the democratization of music,

yes, there are lots of people who lost in the middle, but there are lots of people,

little people, who would never have even got to the first, or second, or third rung on the ladder,

and be making half a living, or a third of a living, or a decent living, out of doing what

they love, you know, which is assisted by technology of delivery, and democratization

of social media, all of those sort of things. Hold that thought. Are you calling me a hypocrite

there, Nick? No, no, I'm not, I'm just, I'm just putting another point of view. We'll be,

we'll be back after this short break. Okay, so, to bring this round to, you know, we are,

I hate this phrase, but it sort of applies here, we are where we are, which is, we're dealing with

this stuff, manufacturers are having to respond very quickly, as we said, Electron have kind of

said, you know, we're not going to be allowing people to, but by the same token, they've also

said, it's fine, the Machinedron X oscillate, operating system, they're fine with that,

because that's obsolete hardware. Is there a world in which this extends the life of existing

hardware, so it can continue to be made, because other people are improving the firmware, the

burden, if you like, is taken away from the manufacturer, you know, they can say, hands off,

or hands on, they can say, yeah, we've tested it, it seems okay, but again, it's up to you,

but it means that people will then still buy the hardware, because they can add those additional

things, and then, you know, there could be a way forward to do it. I mean, you look at the

FM1, which is a 60, 70 quid platform that BoardGirl has done, it's firmware, it's really easy to do,

it seems to be almost, it's a symbiotic relationship, and that's the thing that

I find interesting, which could this actually be a positive thing, Gertz?

Yeah, that's, this FM1 thing is a nice example of providing a platform for experimentation,

so a hardware manufacturer makes his profit from selling the synth, and then, yeah,

people feel encouraged to hack it, and make, personalize in the ways they like, you know,

and so, yeah, it somehow amortizes this insane, I don't know how it's in English,

and sustainability of running all this AI infrastructure, which is a devastating thing,

you know, so maybe it does not offset it, so it does not offset it, of course, completely,

because it's just a tiny part of the business, what AI does, actually, but

maybe, so yeah, that's about providing platforms for experimentation, and then, of course,

hardware manufacturers have to reconsider their business models, for instance, I love motorcycles,

aesthetically, I prefer motorcycles over synthesizers, for instance, KTM had terrible

backlash when they sold their top-of-the-line adventure bike, and then, after a thousand

kilometers, they say, well, no, we are, we are discontinued, but we are switching off some

features, like traction control, or something, which you can get back by paying extra 3.5k,

you know, so that was like terrible backlash from the industry, and so, yeah, the business model

itself has to be reconsidered for hardware companies, or you sell a complete synth,

which has, which is inherently analog, and most, you can hack maybe some control

details, you know, of sequencer, or whatever, what, what engines are, like, how engines are

talking to each other, or something, but, but other ways, really, provide open-source platform,

make big money, make money from, from the hardware, and, and that's it, but then,

that's it, but then, it's middle-sized companies at the risk, because you cannot

make cheap enough hardware, you know, to compete with the larger ones.

Yeah, that's understandable, yeah, that's an, that, that's certainly a point, I mean, if I was Korg,

I mean, and we do know, what was it, the, is it the, the, the, the, the MicroKorg,

oh, I can't remember what it is, the one that's basically got 32 slots for,

for their, their APK stuff, I mean, you could, you can see that, I mean, if I was them, I'd be

plugging that like crazy, and go, yeah, make stuff for it, make stuff for it, and, you know, get people

to, to demonstrate how well it works, and things, because that's ring-fence, you can't break it,

you can only make it, make that bit not work, until you fix the, your, your, your load plugin,

so that would sort of make sense, but that is, it's an interesting point of view, yeah.

Yeah, so, is it a positive thing, you asked, didn't you?

Yeah, can it be?

For the thing, yeah, for the things, for everything that I feel is a bit distasteful

with all of this, you know, like, for instance, I've, again, I can't really release, talk about

details, but I've seen current, current hardware synths that have been sold for, you know, decent

amount of money being hacked, and a software version being made that just runs on ARM, you

know, and I'm like, oh, that's, that's not good, but for every, every distasteful use of this,

I think there's also a, a positive, essentially, because we have to remember that not everyone has

money, and not everyone has money to satiate the latest, the latest piece of gear acquisition

syndrome. So, I imagine that for a lot of people, the, the Mwave FM firmware

hacking marathon, because it started with Bored Girl, but now there's,

well, let's imagine it's a week's time, or two weeks' time, and this is going out,

there are now 1500 firmwares available for the Mwave FM1. Let's see how close we get.

I even made a little meme, which said, this, this, it wasn't real, but I said, this firmware

turns your FM1 into a dating simulator, a virtual girlfriend who talks to you in FM synthesis,

depending on how you've treated them that day. But, you know, I, I bet that could actually be

made by Vibecoding. Yeah, for people who are, yeah, for people who are absolutely broke,

then this is a bit of a golden time, isn't it? Because they'll be able to

make their existing hardware do things they, they never imagined. So, I guess it's,

I guess it's essentially a neutral destabilizing force that is just shaking everything up,

and where it all lands, we don't know yet. Okay, here's another, another, another thought.

So, there's also, and this is a story as old as time, I bought Product X five years ago,

you said you was going to, it was going to do these things, you never fixed the bugs,

you never brought the features in, am I entitled to do what the hell I like, and then make it work,

and then possibly even sell my own version that improves the original hardware, even though you've

discontinued it? Or if it's not discontinued, where does that sort of lie? Would, if you're

then selling hardware based on the fact that my firmware makes it work better, for instance,

I mean, this is a notional concept, where, what does that mean? Gertz, you're the manufacturer,

sorry, I can only come to you. Now, you see, in a contemporary economy, people by default think

that there has to be a firmware update, and, and we, we have multiple occasions when we just release

the instrument, and, like, next day, somebody asks, so when were, when there is a firmware update?

But maybe we even did not intend to make a firmware update.

But is, is that just because you've got a wider user base, and things have been found that maybe,

you know, although I'm sure you or a manufacturer tests incessantly, there were just some edge cases

that, you know, don't immediately become obvious unless you're that user who uses it in a certain

way, so there's, yeah. Sure, sure, absolutely. We have actually a lot of, a lot of bugs discovered

during, during somebody filming a demo for our, for our instrument. Yeah, I've been there, I've done that,

not for you, but I've done that, yeah, definitely. Exactly, exactly, of course. So, yeah, there's

always a process, yeah, but what I, what I meant that people consider that there has to be firmware

updates, have to be firmware updates automatically. Yeah, but, I mean, that all also comes back to the,

to the technology, because, like, a friend of mine composed Rock Opera on Commodore, say,

computer, you know, and, of course, you cannot vibe code, I'm not sure if you can vibe code it,

because, because, you know, it's such a different architecture and, and, yeah,

different peripheries and stuff like that, which, yeah, of course, there is, yeah, there is some,

some threshold where, where this stops. Yeah, I suppose the thing is also,

sometimes firmware stops being upgraded, because something gets discontinued, and there are many

reasons why something gets discontinued. It may just be that the hardware that's in it is no

longer viable, or you can't get the parts, or, you know, the processor doesn't exist anymore,

or it has to be recoded, and that expense is too great. So, I mean, I suppose that's, that's where

we get all of these difficult grey areas, I suppose, and people, people from the outside

just go, well, why can't you just, you know, it's like, yeah, have you tried making something?

I know, I know a couple of, a couple of great composers and, and producers and musicians who

keep laptops without firmware update in their shelves with backing tracks, not backing tracks,

but with, with all projects for, yeah, for their albums, and they do not update any software there,

because the project will just break, and they have, of course, they are wealthy people, and

they have privilege to have a dedicated laptop for each, each project, and it, you know, so that's,

that's also, well, that, yeah, I mean, that's interesting, I mean, I know Yoad, who's a regular

guest on this, he does that, he's got legacy machines, and I think, Pauly, you said you do,

you run some legacy machines as well, don't you? I, I've, I've got Win95, Win98, WinXP,

Max System 7, Max Snow Leopard, that's got some plugins that doesn't, don't run anymore,

so yeah, I've got, I've got quite a few thing, because they, because some of the plugins that

came out back in the day were absolutely amazing, and you'd have to spend serious money to replicate

the functionality, you know, I've got like, I think I've got the whole Waves Gold Collection

or something on one of them, look, a really old version. I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to

become, like, nostalgic, but I mean, the skill of coding back then, you know, was on different level,

I remember when I, when I started advert, working in advertising agencies, like,

most of data was transferred in floppy disks, you know, four megabytes, and, and we still could,

could transfer entire designs to printing house on a floppy disk, you know, and so it works.

It does, yeah, that's interesting, I mean, I can also see, I mean, it would,

it makes sense for a company who do work in firmware and have coding,

there's a nice red floppy there, I've got some floppies ready, just to have somebody,

just for anyone who's really young and doesn't know what a floppy disk is.

So, as I was saying, I think, I think there's a, there's, is there, is there an argument for having,

like, so a mid-sized company has firmware developing across multiple platforms, you have,

you know, you have various coders, is there an argument for having ring fencing a percentage

of time for those coders then to go crazy on the vibe coding thing, because they know the code,

they know the, the, the capabilities of the machine, could they then improve and increase

the, the quality of the output with these tools, or is it not that simple?

We, our engineers do use AI tools to, to be more efficient, to, to write code, like,

you know, you need to look at the broader scale, of course, if, if the, if the coder is,

has, like, he's advanced one, then it's no problem to, to do that, but there were bigger companies

with, with multiple departments that do specific parts of the coding, and so then,

then reports are actually that productivity does not increase, because, like, senior coders have to

check this messy code from, from junior coders, and, and, you know, it's, it levels out somewhere

at the moment. Maybe these AI tools will improve, and, and it will be, it will be much,

like, will become more productive, but, but, yeah, I, I'm not denying we are using

AI tools for coding, and it's, it's really, it really improves productivity, yes.

But I guess the thing is, is you're delivering something that is commercially paid for

at scale, and has to work, and has to, had to meet certain standards, whereas me sitting in

the office and going, oh, I've written a new firmware thing for the pocket operator, or

whatever, and now it does this thing, isn't it fun, is a completely different proposition, and,

and because we can all post something to Instagram, go, hey, I want mine to do that, and, you know,

people can, can do or not. I think it seems like the argument is, it could be great, but it can

also be not. It's, it's, it's caveat emptor, isn't it? It's, you know, try it by all means, go for it

by all means, but we can't, you know, you can't expect the manufacturer to support it, or justify

not adding those features themselves, because they, as you say, they have the bigger picture,

so there's a sort of, the bigger picture is the thing. Does that seem like a good summary?

Yeah. So, anyway, Gerts, you're, you're going to Asia. I think it's probably time to wrap

things up a little bit. I, I had planned on, on, on introducing a load of videos and stuff,

but I think the intro, the, the, the discussion has been fascinating as it is. But what's next

for you, then? You're going to Asia, going to be, going to Beijing Modular, where I will be seeing

you, or have seen you, by the time this is, I don't know, this is all a bit weird. And then

exciting stuff, any, yeah, I guess you can't tell us, but, but products in development,

things on the go, all times, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm bringing some,

some exciting new modules to, to Beijing Modular. So, we haven't put out some new modules for a

while. We're more focusing on, on desktop or standalone instruments. So, this development

took some time, but it's, it's, I'm super excited about it. So, tomorrow you will see it.

But, yeah, I, I, just to, to wrap it up, I, I, we are living in amazing times again. You know,

at a certain point, I felt that, well, nothing like major happens in a span of our lifetime.

You know, this will be some boring generation or something, but, but, but now, you know, see

how world is changing and, you know, instead of decades, some time ago, it's, it's months,

it's months and we need to. I mean, our challenge, our challenge is as a society and governance and

administration is how we respond to that because, you know, you can't respond quickly enough if

things are changing that fast. And so, you have to be mindful of it. So, regulation is probably the

way to go at some point. But anyway, well, Paulie, thanks for coming on again. Next thing for you,

I guess, I've got something, I don't, it's weird because I don't know whether we can talk about it

yet because it's a week's time. I don't know. Stuff in the pipeline, stuff in the pipeline.

I, no, I thought I'd, I thought I'd end on something I've been musing about, you know,

just as a general overview of this whole topic. I think that we should, you know, if people want

to dip their toes into AI and see what it offers and, and explore it, that's one thing, but I don't

think we should, we should give up our skills and our cognitive stuff, you know what I mean?

Because the industry is apparently four point something trillion in debt or projected to be

that much in debt. So, I don't think it's going to stay as it is forever. I think maybe this,

you know, AI coding tools might get way more expensive one day if, you know, it can't be

subsidized anymore, you know, because there's only so much money in the world, isn't it,

to keep it throwing something that's losing all this money. So, I just suggest to everyone,

you know, keep your wits about you, keep reading the odd book, and keep the grey matter, you know,

going, basically. And play an instrument. Yeah. Play an instrument. Absolutely. That sounds like

perfect stuff. What a great, that's a positive note to end on. Gert and Paulie, thank you ever

so much. I'm going to wrap things up now. I press this button and the show ends. So, let's,

let's see what happens. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye. Ciao.

Bye.