Music hardware, AI and the flattening of devices

Of late, there has been a tidal wave of ‘new’ unofficial firmware patches popping up for music hardware. The trend has sped up all the more since the release of Reverse Engineer Anything, which allows one to turbo charge Claude et al with even more ability to, well, reverse engineer anything.

I don’t own a great deal of music hardware these days, but with only a couple of exceptions, every piece of kit I own now has some kind of modded firmware available. The Arturia MicroFreak now has Superfreaker. The Polyend Tracker now has Tracker RE. My 1010 Blackbox now has an SP1200 mode thanks to new firmware. The list goes on.

In short then, the walled gardens are coming down. What was once off limits and only accessible with serious amounts of labour is now almost trivially easy to achieve.

A few thoughts therefore spring up from this…

First: I wonder if this will lead to a kind of flattening of the hardware music gear space. Think about it: if a device has some buttons, dials, a screen and a processor, why can’t it be all manner of emulated music hardware? Could it be a Waldorf Wave today, and a 303 tomorrow? Could the Polyend Tracker turn into a Dirtywave M8? After all, when you reduce these things down, they have a vast amount of overlap in terms of the physical inputs and the kit sitting under the hood. Ergo, will this usher in a new era of “does anything”-type devices that can take on whatever function is required, albeit with a quick firmware flash beforehand?

Second: is this about to expose instances of forced obsolescence? Take the Polyend Tracker modded firmware linked about. That adds all the functions (well, bar a couple) of the Polyend Tracker Mini, including things like stereo playback. Until now, we were told this was not possible on that original Tracker device. This new firmware appears to prove that is not the case. So, what is going on? Were Polyend unable to code this due to limitations within their own dev team, or was this feature deliberately left off so as to drive sales of the updated Mini and Tracker+ models?

Finally: what will happen when music companies catch up? Right now I think it is safe to say they have all been blindsided by what is going on. Modded versions of their firmware are popping up left, right and centre - all bypassing testing for the most part, and all coming with none of the assurances of stability etc. In that regard, this is an unfair contest, as these companies have to work to a higher standard of stability. Soon though, they will catch up, and when they do, I wonder how they will embrace all of this.

Some companies are already realising you cannot put lightning back in the bottle. 1010, I noticed, are not attempting to deny the existence of these mods. As a business it seems to have accepted that this will happen, but has politely (and fairly, IMO) asked users not to discuss this stuff on the official forums. After all, that would suggest some kind of endorsement, which is not technically the case.

Others, like M-Wave, are positively embracing this new world, setting up a workbench environment for its device and generally supporting all of this development work.

Where others - especially big hitters - go from here remains to be seen. Certainly though this is all changing the landscape, substantially, and I’m curious to see how things shake out.

For now, I will say this: it’s lovely to see devices for whom support and new firmware has long since expired getting this new lease of life. I can’t wait to see if someone will do a firmware mod to patch the infamous export issue on the Polyend Tracker, for example, which is the main reason I stopped using it.

Onward!