Polyend releases the Tracker firmware source code
25 points by jussi
25 points by jussi
Oh wow, I had a feeling they may do this. There has been a lot of vibe-reverse-engineering done for this firmware over the past few weeks. I think this is the right call for a device that has fallen to the bottom of the Polyend catalogue. I love my Tracker but it definitely felt like Polyend was not going to support it for much longer (especially after the Tracker+ and Tracker MIni).
This is on the heels of M-VAVE also doing the same after the onslaught of vibe-coded custom firmwares. It makes sense in my head as a software guy - sell the hardware and the package and let the software be free/open. Hopefully this actually grows the market for custom/free/open software on boutique hardware. I hear Behringer is going to do something like but I don't hold a lot of respect for that company or its leader.
Erica Synths also released the LXR-02 firmware (https://www.ericasynths.lv/news/post/lxropenmod/) quoting explicitly the vibe-RE/hacking ongoing. I would bu curious if there would be some sort of community led movement like for Deluge. Or we may more see some firmware à la carte like https://modwerk.app. It is an interesting time.
Oh nice, I didn't realize the LXR-02 firmware was open-sourced as well. It looks like there is a lot of new, open music tools coming right now. I really like it but I have a suspicion we are going to be inundated with devices and software over the next year. The true test, of course, is if people actually start making music with these things.
Really interesting to see this happening across the music tech landscape. Wonder what this means for what you can do with the synth engine, and which parts they're not opening? "Binary blobs for libPolySynth.a and libPolyDSP.a with a LICENSE-PROPRIETARY.txt. Maybe they provide primitives that you can call into? Would need to look much deeper but interested if anyone has a quicker take than I do
They do provide the API for these blobs. Is that what you're asking about?
I would assume with something like this we can take a synth engine from something like Surge and then wrap it up with these APIs to have it run inside Tracker - unless I'm mistaken about something.
Edit: digging a bit further, yeah, the API is used to build new synths and the blob does something in the firmware to get it up and running. I don't have a Tracker+ or Tracker Mini to noodle around with this though.