Synthmaker forum DB?

[trogluddite]

Maybe if everyone who wants the SM forum back writes to Malc

He heard plenty about it back in the dark days of the metamorphosis from SM/Outsim into FS/DSPr. There were a lot more forum" regulars" back then too - and we were not happy bunnies!

The original announcement on the SM forum was that it was going to be deleted entirely as soon as FS was released and had its own forum set up. What I can only describe as "rioting" broke out on the forum immediately - there were many extremely heated debates about the seemingly offhand way that the content was going to be discarded, and many appeals to Malc and his then business partners. Eventually, DSPr conceded that the SM forum would remain available for a grace period of unspecified length, and (IIRC) there was some kind of change to the discounts for SM to FS upgraders.

It was suspected by some of us that, because FS/DSPr was supposed to be a fresh start, part of the reason for culling the old content was because the forum contained so much criticism of SM and Outsim. The gripes were much the same as now; lack of updates, new VST standards, the perception that the few updates were often little more than Betas, perennial bugs that never got fixed, etc. These suspicions were only heightened when one of the most "pro-fresh-start" members of the SM forum was "outed" as a DSPr employee/partner who hadn't seen fit to mention this little fact. FlowStone was to be sold as a "new" product in a market which hadn't been tapped before (education), so from a commercial image management point of view, it's easy to see why making legacy criticism "disappear" might have been tempting.

I have to be honest, I said some rather ungentlemanly things about DSPr and Malc myself at the time. I could understand Malc having to make changes so that his company could survive, but the lack of acknowledgement of forum members' hard work building new modules, Beta testing, bug-chasing, writing the SM Wiki, etc. really stuck in my throat. To be fair to him, he never bore any grudges about it, and I carried over my moderating to here (and my Beta testing to FS!) How much was really down to financial pressures, image management, or just oversight, we'll never know; but they were certainly "interesting times" (especially as a moderator of the "disgruntled" persuasion!)

[Spogg]

Trog, thank you so much for that historical background.

I could never really see the reasoning behind the decision, so I made one up.
You’ve clarified the conflict between technical, political and business decisions back then very clearly.

I do think it was the wrong decision. I’d heard of SynthMaker and tried it out after I’d tested SynthEdit. The old copy I had was so good I decided to buy it. It was only then that I found out about FlowStone, simply because it was linked on the SynthMaker site. I’m not sure I would have found FlowStone otherwise.

The SynthMaker and SynthEdit brands were well known at the time, but even now FlowStone seems far more obscure. Just take a look at this test search on Google:

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... own+synths

Where is FlowStone?

Cheers

Spogg

[trogluddite]

Trog, thank you so much for that historical background.

I still have a certain nostalgia for the SM days. The move into a new market was seen as a death-knell for the DSP/VST side of things by a lot of the old SM regulars, and was the impetus for many of them to move on to new pastures. We lost a lot of the SM gurus who taught me my chops and that I later collaborated with on optimisations, tutorials, and filling the gaps in the official documentation. I have nothing but gratitude for the members who salvaged and made available so much of the work from those days.

I do think it was the wrong decision.

There was a lot of talk about trying to maintain some kind of continuity - even if only by continuing the name as a specialist bundle of FS with VST export and audio DSP module included. Whatever might be said, my years of regularly corresponding with Malc always led me to believe that, if he could set aside commercial considerations, he does have a genuine passion for music-making tools.

In a way, I almost see the move to the educational market as underselling FlowStone. I used to work for a company in that market and, if you can get a toe in the door, it's a large reservoir of users who, for the most part, will have little need for the kind of advanced features that we hanker for (and as with the customers of the company that I worked for, they rarely seem to join in with user forums.) I've always thought that with the right investment, FS could become a class-leading general purpose programming platform, because it's interface is still by far the best graphical coding environment that I've found. It could be so much more - a creator of mobile-phone apps, website scripter, Arduino programmer, etc.; and of course, a specialist version for us DSP freaks! Sadly, it's all down to the numbers; making plugins is just too niche an application to be a big money-spinner, I think.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

If I ever get rich with My music I'll buy it and pay to have it upgraded. All Youz have to doo is promote Me on the internet and itz will happen.

A sure thing; I have faith, Le Attol - Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFyiAf8F7-o&list=PLQRk32qC85xfBFAi3X9e-RaJif43_vzgV

[MichaelBenjamin]

.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

It's a good idea and I will do exactly that. Thanks Michael

Yep, i install SM on my windoze machines right after notepad++. Super cool still today to quickly hack something together or test something. And the wysiwyg interface stuff is just heaven compared to the alternatives.
I just didn't make the switch at that time bcs i didn't like the pay-per year price policy, wasn't a huge fan of ruby.

@wlangfor
you might do it, if you really push that "no-divisions-used-in-code" thing and blow it up even further into some elaborate rule set for the signal path about what kind of x86 opcode is allowed as "pure" and which opcodes destroy sound and make it "unpure". with the real mental fortitude you can define your music as "pure" (divisionless) and market it as such. then goto gearslutz and kvr and try to create some shitstorm, collect followers, repeat.

[trogluddite]

I just didn't make the switch at that time bcs i didn't like the pay-per year price policy

As advised by the good folks here, I've down-graded to FS 3.0.6 for better stability. While reading through the version history to see if there'd be any features that I'd miss (nope!), I couldn't help but notice that none of them show the dates when they were released. Now I wonder why that might be?

I could never see the supposed new market for FS, schools and colleges, making that financial model work particularly well, either. I've worked as both a school/college lab technician and in the STEM-education products industry. My experience is that, generally speaking, once a department's teachers/lecturers have got a system for teaching a curriculum worked out, they'll stick with it for as long as possible, and there's a perennial "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude to resources because of limited budgets. It's a market that's rather averse to update-treadmills and paid-for technical support etc., on the whole.

[RJHollins]

Hi TROG .... and the GANG.

I installed FS 1.07. Seems to be running without issue.

My reasoning was due to mention of some RUBY 'fix' [?}

Maybe it was insignificant ... but I don't know

[trogluddite]

My reasoning was due to mention of some RUBY 'fix' [?}

Hi there! Yes, it's a problem that was introduced with 3.0.8, when Ruby "time-outs" were changed to be per-RubyEdit. You can read all about it on this thread - in summary, it makes Ruby events create lots of new threads which then leak memory when Ruby doesn't clean them up properly. As Spogg and others have pointed out, going back to 3.0.6 has definitely made FS feel more responsive, too.

[RJHollins]

My reasoning was due to mention of some RUBY 'fix' [?}

Hi there! Yes, it's a problem that was introduced with 3.0.8, when Ruby "time-outs" were changed to be per-RubyEdit. You can read all about it on this thread - in summary, it makes Ruby events create lots of new threads which then leak memory when Ruby doesn't clean them up properly. As Spogg and others have pointed out, going back to 3.0.6 has definitely made FS feel more responsive, too.

Hi TROG.

Thanks for the above link ... read through the 7 pages ... but still left with question ??!

No real mention of v:3.07. either positive or negative.

The reason I installed 1.07 was this:

Version 3.0.7 CHERRY

This update fixes a few bugs and also introduces more click board support for FlowPaw.

We have added support for two new click boards: RFID, which reads RFID tags and Gyro which is a 3-axis gyroscope. There's also a new BalanceBot component which makes it easier to create self balancing robots.

There were a few bugs we wanted to clear up which came as a result of the last release so these have now been rectified.

IMPROVEMENTS

New FlowPaw support for RFID and Gyro click boards
New BalanceBot component for making self balancing robots using FlowPaw
New getViewPos method in Ruby allows you to find the position of the view in the parent panel

FIXES

Fixed a bug in the Indexer component that caused it to fail when you connected multiple links from the same output
Fixed a problem with the new bitmap saving in Ruby components being too slow and using too much disk space
Fixed an issue with File|Open not working in FlowStone STEM on Windows XP
Fixed a bug that was causing Ruby errors to appear on loading when the Ruby code has no 'event' method

That last line is what caught my attention .... but as it turned out, the RUBY errors I kept seeing was due to MY coding [which you have kindly corrected ... and is working great].

My concern ... compatibility with others on the forum. I suspect those using 3.06 would maybe not be able to load 3.07 schematics. Also ... to maybe be in the minority of Users ... for what?

What just wonder why 3.07 is being ignored/avoided ?

The technical reasoning may be above my experience. Sure I can down to 3.06 ... but it still makes me wonder why.

Hey ... not looking to cause a ruckess or challenge those more knowledgeable about this ... just looking to better understand. And if 3.06 is THE one do use currently ... I simply switch ... and wait for what the future brings.

Thanks Again !