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Re: Innovative Gear That Got Discontinued was Electro HarmonixFreeze - Vortex Patch

Rick Walker schrieb:
> This comment got me to thinking about all the innovative musical gear 
> projects
> that got discontinued much to the detriment of future creativity and 
> innovation.
The reason here is that the relationship between a development engineer 
and a product manager is something alike to that between an artist and a 
record company A&R manager. Well, it's usually not that bad, but similar.
Manufacturing and supporting a specific product brings with it a lot of 
fixed costs (both one-time and per-time), and even more so if the 
product does not fit in well with the rest of your product line. This 
seems to be the case in all of the examples mentioned here: Lexicon has 
its focus on very high priced studio processors, Gibson has its focus on 
electric guitars, and Antares has its focus on more "normal" processors 
with a special emphasis on vocals.

Similar to the world of record labels, computers have brought a change 
here to some extent. While in the past, unless you were really crazy and 
highly talented, you wouldn't just build a Vortex-kinda thing for 
yourself (and you wouldn't under no circumstances build it for others), 
software has brought a change here. Both with interesting 
development/runtime frameworks and the possibility to distribute freely, 
something like the Kantos dervative you're longing for can be done in PD 
or Reaktor or MAX/MSP, and (unless it violates Antares 
copyrights/patents) can also be distributed without any support - on the 
basis of "if I already did it, I can put it out as well and perhaps even 
get some money for it".

As you mentioned, the EDP got kicked by Gibson - so what? There's Möbius 
which does a lot of things the EDP does (and more). Want a hardware 
version? Port Möbius to some kind of platform FPGA eval board (priced 
around $400) and have fun. And in a wonderful fashion, if someone does 
that for the fun of it, there are no pre-production costs (or rather, 
the pre-production costs are his spare time).

Ok, back to topic...has anyone ever done a software version of the 
Vortex btw?

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