[sdiy] The Owl: ARM fx pedal

[rsdio at sounds.wa.com]

On Apr 24, 2013, at 12:33, firemote wrote:
> Yeah, it's hard to get the wider effects market to support VSTs,  
> why shouldn't it be even harder to support a niche like AU?
I did a bad job of making my point.

Porting from VST to AU is probably the easiest port to make, because  
the environment is almost exactly the same. Parameters are slightly  
different, hosts are slightly different, but in some cases they're  
even the same host. My point was that despite being easy, it's hard  
to convince VST developers to make an AU version of their plugin. The  
number of people running Logic is much, much greater than the number  
of guitarists with a programmable digital pedal.

In contrast, porting a VST from a DAW to an embedded, battery-powered  
platform is much, much harder than porting a VST to AU. Thus, my  
assumption is that if VST developers are reluctant to take a few easy  
steps to access the huge Logic, GarageBand, Ableton market, then  
they're not going to be eager to work even harder to support a paltry  
few guitarists who want a digital pedal that they can download  
plugins into.

Just my prediction. Nobody can see the future.


> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:26 PM, JoelB <onephatcat at earthlink.net>  
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Apr 24, 2013, at 11:46 AM, rsdio at sounds.wa.com wrote:
>>
>> > It's hard enough to convince VST plugin developers to support  
>> AudioUnits, which represent a huge market compared to an fx pedal
>>
>> Hmm, I would think the market for audio units(Mac owners) is much  
>> smaller than the market for effects pedals (all guitarists  
>> everywhere on the planet)
Not every guitarist will buy this specific pedal. Also, very few will  
actually want to write code for a pedal.

The market for all guitar pedals taken as a group is huge! But the  
market for an individual guitar pedal is quite small because there  
are so many. Just ask any boutique guitar pedal maker. That said, if  
you were designing a 9V adaptor for guitar pedals then you'd have a  
huge market, because that product would be attractive to every  
guitarist. Meanwhile, a programmable digital pedal is a small market.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting