That, plus the fact people were already poking into the closed firmware binary, plus the existence of an alternative firmware. By doing this, Polyend also kind of passes the responsibility of maintaining the Tracker devices to the community.
It's also worth mentioning that the release is not just a source code release, they added a lot of great features like sample streaming, and dedicated velocity and timing lanes. And they released APIs so that people can easily create new synth engines and effects.
It's more likely because LLM usage and particularly REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is opening up those firmwares whether the vendor likes it or not.
The best strategy for a HW-vendor at this point is to get ahead of it and open-source the firmware under your own License Agreement, so you can possibly also integrate community work back into your official firmware.
I'm happy that some move in this direction.
The much more terrible strategy is litigation and moving as much logic as possible away from the product into some cloud-service (requiring periodic online-connection, etc.).
We already see both trajectories, so I hope the customers will decide wisely which strategy to fund...
Would also be a good solution, yes: Removing themselves entirely from the problem.
Looking at how e.g. Roland is repeatedly building new hardware around the same digital "analogue emulation" engine, this shift in the market could make it more viable again to build actual analogue hardware.
Or..."let's add Wi-Fi and a subscription model so the device has to check-in to our servers every week"
(this is already happening, especially many established brands seem to be leaning more and more in this direction)
Yes. Custom firmware for audio gear has been A Thing for a long time, as far back as the 1990s. I worked on a company that offered a general DSP platform back in 2003, but it didn't take off because it was too difficult for most people to program. JJOS became very popular among users of Akai's MPC line (of whom there are very many) in the mid-2000s.
The combinations of LLMs and agentic reverse-engineering skills have sent things into overdrive in recent months. As well as allowing people to repurpose cheap gear like the M-VAVE it has also revealed that a lot of larger vendors have been outright lying to their users about hardware limitations to more effectively segment their target market. In my the future is high quality controllers/converters with a generic SOC inside. Behringer is already going down this route and has the manufacturing heft to do it quickly and with a decent level of quality. Akai also seems to have jumped in on the trend.
I have been doing firmware hacking of audio devices as a hobby for the last 20 years. I released a CFW for Volca Sample almost a decade ago that was fairly well received, but have also hacked other Volcas, Zoom multitrackers, Line6 fx, Variax guitar, Digitech looper, couple Reface, AKAI, Stylobeat etc. I have some observations:
1. I tried running ghidra from claude about a year ago. I was not impressed, it was not really that good. It felt confused and not knowledgeable enough. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, and must say - it is nothing less than spectacular. I am having a small existential crisis here, Terry Tao light. 100x my skill, 1000x my speed it feels like.
2. Like all consumer products, design and brand is essential to the buyer/user experience of audio tools. Removing options in UX is what design entails a lot of the time. You are in reality paying a premium for options to be deleted from menus, gently nudging you into a curated brand culture. Acting like it is inherently bad is missing the point. It is like insisting everybody should roll their own Arch Linux on their laptops.
3. Audio tools/synths/fx/sequencers/controllers are instruments. The value of an instrument is to a great extent dependent on the time invested in learning it, as opposed to inherent things like "audio quality". Music is very in-the-moment, so any cognitive friction that takes you out of the flow is gonna detract from the experience. Having a "fixed" UX is in this sense a way of focusing, honing muscle memory and releasing flow. Watch Jeff Mills hunched over a 909, that is some Paganini shit. Standardization drives adoption, adoption fuels cultural expression, expression creates genres.
From an individual tech-loving buyers' point of view, the AI revolution in CFW is fantastic, from the vendors point of view, not that easy to handle.
For people afraid of bricking their units, I can't stress enough how groundbreaking it is that they're acknowledging that risk and still offering to repair your unit. You pay of course, because this is a risk you took, but at least they will have a look at it:
"Out-of-Warranty Repairs Available: In the unlikely event that something ever goes wrong with your hardware while using custom firmware, it is not covered under standard warranty. However, Polyend is always happy to help get your instrument back up and running through its official out-of-warranty repair service (standard service, parts, and shipping fees apply."
Hmm, out-of-warranty repairs for music hardware is pretty standard, at least here in Europe. I've done this with Elektron, Novation, Korg, Adam Audio, Yamaha and a bunch of other brands before as well, with everything from speakers to synths. Is it different in the US perhaps?
I've even sent gear running custom firmware in for out-of-warranty repairs, without any questions asked about it. AFAIK, even if you're within warranty with custom firmware, they would need to prove it's specifically the fault of the custom firmware in order to deny warranty claims, they couldn't refuse it outright just because of the firmware on the device.
Two days ago I (that is, AI) started to mod my modal electronics Cobalt8 after trying the model:cycles mods.
Half a day of setup and i had my first curtis-style filter on the synth. 2 days of low intensity prompting and I have
- 3 Filters: Curtis, 303, Steiner Parker
- An additional noise source
- The oscillators from braids
- Prophet08-ish oscillators in a stable and instable fashion
- a granular delay, tape saturation and a klon centaur like distortion
- karplus filter and a body resonance fx
- polystep arp (different pattern per note) with scales or gated euclidean patterns
I have interest but no skill in dsp programming (never found the time to pursue it). I love the filters and oscillators, it went from a tame, boring synth to gritty synth I like to play. At the same time I have to stress that this is a result, not an
achievement.
Anyone with a 20$ claude subscription can do that and people do. So I think it’s smart to open source(and not novel, see modular synths diy modules). Though when gigging I need devices that are stable and working in any conditions and I’m willing to pay for that.
The avalanche of reverse engineered/custom firmwares is definitely changing the synth landscape. I'm wondering how many other companies will start open sourcing. It isn't always trivial since sometimes there's proprietary software components or toolchains that can't be open sourced. But it's hard to imagine it won't be more common.
There's a lot of mixed feelings in the community. A lot of musicians don't like AI, but they do want to have more features and bug fixes. A lot of synth makers are probably ambivalent too, especially if they have a stronger vision of what the synths should be that custom firmware ignore. Not to mention the commercial implications of adding features into existing synths, possibly making newer models less appealing. And of course people are copying UIs and workflows from other synths that took a lot of work to develop.
musicians do not want AI in what they believe is the product of human mind and soul but will not have so many problems with whatever they're not skilled at, or find tedious and boring.
Just like us, but with graphics or landing pages ;)
Modwiggler is filling with reverse engineering mods, I think it is super smart to get out in front of that. Modding is nothing new and open source music firmware à la Mutable Instruments is a great example to learn from. Good move Polyend!
That’s cool. After M-vave's FM1 and TE's OP-1 revolution, going this path is almost mandatory for anyone with good hardware but a crappy interface. I'd love to love Polyend's software, but M8 is so far ahead in terms of power and intuitiveness.
The fact that M-VAVE capitalized on a F/OSS synthesizer that has been well lauded as a great implementation of FM for a while should not be overlooked.
Other manufacturers could’ve done this. There are amazing F/OSS synth engines out there.
See also, the Zynthian hardware and the ZynAddSubFX synth.
Ableton is my DAW of choice. I haven’t regretted the purchase of a license for it a single day in my life. Even though much of what I use it for would be equally doable probably in the “Lite” version of Ableton that came with several of the pieces of hardware that I have. I was initially using the Lite version and eventually pulled the trigger on upgrading after having been on Lite for more than a while.
Just weighing in with my opinion: I started using DAWs with Cubase on an Atari ST. I've used everything. Cakewalk, ProTools, Reaper, Bitwig, Ardour, Studio One, Jeskola Buzz ;-) Music 2000 on a Playstation etc, etc. You name it and I've probably used it at least once.
Ableton is amazing. I keep coming back to it. I've used it as my daily driver since version 3 (pirated) and I've paid for it since version 6.
It would be awesome to have a Linux version (aside from the headless one in the Push 3 standalone) and it would be awesome to have a native SDK for device development, and it would be extra awesome if they open sourced it (never going to happen, but I can dream).
It's cool if you don't like it, but don't tell other people what they should or shouldn't use. You can offer alternatives, but just telling people they're wrong is arrogant and unhelpful.
I'm secretly wishing for Ableton to not become FOSS, even though I probably couldn't survive without Ableton, and I'm also into FOSS. But I fear if Ableton would become FOSS, they'd just eat the entire DAW market, and it'd be impossible for new entries to even get the slightest of attention.
At least this way there are still cause for eyeing in other directions than Ableton.
I think logic will stick around. A lot of people want to stay in the Apple ecosystem. And doesn’t Pro Tools still has a grip on the professional studio market?
Maybe finally someone can take a look at the timing issues. This was a shitshow for a long time. Haha! At one point i think the tempo drifted between individual stems in an export?
Hopefully someone fixes the arpeggiator too. They made some implementation decisions that really messed it up for chiptune style stuff. (Retriggering the envelope on every arp step, not allowing for arbitrary chords(!))
I'm glad! It makes sense though: the community has been reverse engineering it and building their own with LLM help lately. I love my Tracker+, such a neat bit of kit, and I'm excited to see what we can do now the firmware is open
That's not what the message says though. It implies using marketing cookies there, not externally. They could've said "Click to play from YouTube (may involve cookie tracking)" if it's actually for YouTube
This has to be related to MWAVE's FM-1 viral popularity, largely due to open firmware right?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-impulse-purchas...
https://github.com/aroum/fm1-custom-fw
see also:
> Reverse Engineering of the M-VAVE FM-1 Pocket Synthesizer Firmware
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994065 (75 points - 50 comments)
That, plus the fact people were already poking into the closed firmware binary, plus the existence of an alternative firmware. By doing this, Polyend also kind of passes the responsibility of maintaining the Tracker devices to the community.
It's also worth mentioning that the release is not just a source code release, they added a lot of great features like sample streaming, and dedicated velocity and timing lanes. And they released APIs so that people can easily create new synth engines and effects.
Bring Roland VSynth capabilities to it.
It's more likely because LLM usage and particularly REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is opening up those firmwares whether the vendor likes it or not.
The best strategy for a HW-vendor at this point is to get ahead of it and open-source the firmware under your own License Agreement, so you can possibly also integrate community work back into your official firmware.
I'm happy that some move in this direction.
The much more terrible strategy is litigation and moving as much logic as possible away from the product into some cloud-service (requiring periodic online-connection, etc.).
We already see both trajectories, so I hope the customers will decide wisely which strategy to fund...
They can either do this or put enough analog circuitry in gear that firmware makes little difference. Both seem fine to me as a consumer.
Would also be a good solution, yes: Removing themselves entirely from the problem.
Looking at how e.g. Roland is repeatedly building new hardware around the same digital "analogue emulation" engine, this shift in the market could make it more viable again to build actual analogue hardware.
Or..."let's add Wi-Fi and a subscription model so the device has to check-in to our servers every week"
(this is already happening, especially many established brands seem to be leaning more and more in this direction)
> more viable again to build actual analogue hardware
Korg Volcas are analogue and have sold orders of magnitude more devices than any of these boutique brands.
Yes. Custom firmware for audio gear has been A Thing for a long time, as far back as the 1990s. I worked on a company that offered a general DSP platform back in 2003, but it didn't take off because it was too difficult for most people to program. JJOS became very popular among users of Akai's MPC line (of whom there are very many) in the mid-2000s.
The combinations of LLMs and agentic reverse-engineering skills have sent things into overdrive in recent months. As well as allowing people to repurpose cheap gear like the M-VAVE it has also revealed that a lot of larger vendors have been outright lying to their users about hardware limitations to more effectively segment their target market. In my the future is high quality controllers/converters with a generic SOC inside. Behringer is already going down this route and has the manufacturing heft to do it quickly and with a decent level of quality. Akai also seems to have jumped in on the trend.
Yup. I remember the Yamaha TX16W sampler whose software was so horribly hostile that someone developed an alternative OS called Typhoon.
SoundArt Chameleon?
Still got mine. That project produced some very nice effects and synthesizers ..
>M-VAVE
Lest we not forget about Monome NORNS and Zynthians too ..
I have been doing firmware hacking of audio devices as a hobby for the last 20 years. I released a CFW for Volca Sample almost a decade ago that was fairly well received, but have also hacked other Volcas, Zoom multitrackers, Line6 fx, Variax guitar, Digitech looper, couple Reface, AKAI, Stylobeat etc. I have some observations:
1. I tried running ghidra from claude about a year ago. I was not impressed, it was not really that good. It felt confused and not knowledgeable enough. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, and must say - it is nothing less than spectacular. I am having a small existential crisis here, Terry Tao light. 100x my skill, 1000x my speed it feels like.
2. Like all consumer products, design and brand is essential to the buyer/user experience of audio tools. Removing options in UX is what design entails a lot of the time. You are in reality paying a premium for options to be deleted from menus, gently nudging you into a curated brand culture. Acting like it is inherently bad is missing the point. It is like insisting everybody should roll their own Arch Linux on their laptops.
3. Audio tools/synths/fx/sequencers/controllers are instruments. The value of an instrument is to a great extent dependent on the time invested in learning it, as opposed to inherent things like "audio quality". Music is very in-the-moment, so any cognitive friction that takes you out of the flow is gonna detract from the experience. Having a "fixed" UX is in this sense a way of focusing, honing muscle memory and releasing flow. Watch Jeff Mills hunched over a 909, that is some Paganini shit. Standardization drives adoption, adoption fuels cultural expression, expression creates genres.
From an individual tech-loving buyers' point of view, the AI revolution in CFW is fantastic, from the vendors point of view, not that easy to handle.
For people afraid of bricking their units, I can't stress enough how groundbreaking it is that they're acknowledging that risk and still offering to repair your unit. You pay of course, because this is a risk you took, but at least they will have a look at it:
Does the board come with a jtag interface to unbrick the device?
> groundbreaking it is that
Hmm, out-of-warranty repairs for music hardware is pretty standard, at least here in Europe. I've done this with Elektron, Novation, Korg, Adam Audio, Yamaha and a bunch of other brands before as well, with everything from speakers to synths. Is it different in the US perhaps?
I've even sent gear running custom firmware in for out-of-warranty repairs, without any questions asked about it. AFAIK, even if you're within warranty with custom firmware, they would need to prove it's specifically the fault of the custom firmware in order to deny warranty claims, they couldn't refuse it outright just because of the firmware on the device.
Two days ago I (that is, AI) started to mod my modal electronics Cobalt8 after trying the model:cycles mods.
Half a day of setup and i had my first curtis-style filter on the synth. 2 days of low intensity prompting and I have
- 3 Filters: Curtis, 303, Steiner Parker
- An additional noise source
- The oscillators from braids
- Prophet08-ish oscillators in a stable and instable fashion
- a granular delay, tape saturation and a klon centaur like distortion
- karplus filter and a body resonance fx
- polystep arp (different pattern per note) with scales or gated euclidean patterns
I have interest but no skill in dsp programming (never found the time to pursue it). I love the filters and oscillators, it went from a tame, boring synth to gritty synth I like to play. At the same time I have to stress that this is a result, not an achievement. Anyone with a 20$ claude subscription can do that and people do. So I think it’s smart to open source(and not novel, see modular synths diy modules). Though when gigging I need devices that are stable and working in any conditions and I’m willing to pay for that.
The avalanche of reverse engineered/custom firmwares is definitely changing the synth landscape. I'm wondering how many other companies will start open sourcing. It isn't always trivial since sometimes there's proprietary software components or toolchains that can't be open sourced. But it's hard to imagine it won't be more common. There's a lot of mixed feelings in the community. A lot of musicians don't like AI, but they do want to have more features and bug fixes. A lot of synth makers are probably ambivalent too, especially if they have a stronger vision of what the synths should be that custom firmware ignore. Not to mention the commercial implications of adding features into existing synths, possibly making newer models less appealing. And of course people are copying UIs and workflows from other synths that took a lot of work to develop.
musicians do not want AI in what they believe is the product of human mind and soul but will not have so many problems with whatever they're not skilled at, or find tedious and boring.
Just like us, but with graphics or landing pages ;)
Relatedly, Erika Synths released the source code of the LXR-02 very recently as well: https://www.ericasynths.lv/news/post/lxropen
(I/AI had fun porting it to wasm/web! I don't want to seem too self-link'y, so if anyone asks, happy to share the link)
I also have a Polyend Tracker for sale if anyone's in the market..! It's a great device, I'm just trying to focus on having less right now.
Share the link!
https://lxr02-recomp.greg.technology/ :)
Very smart move. Open-source your project. Get more nerds invested in your gear and its legacy, and crowd-source feature development.
Well done, Polyend! Godspeed, and looking forward to seeing how this develops.
It makes sense as Polyend's competitor, Synthstrom, has been open source for a while already.
I thought their competitor was M8 tracker, so nice to hear about Synthstrom, thanks! Glad we have a growing space for making things that make music!
And it has to be said, the Deluge has gotten pretty freakin’ amazing as a result of it.
Modwiggler is filling with reverse engineering mods, I think it is super smart to get out in front of that. Modding is nothing new and open source music firmware à la Mutable Instruments is a great example to learn from. Good move Polyend!
That’s cool. After M-vave's FM1 and TE's OP-1 revolution, going this path is almost mandatory for anyone with good hardware but a crappy interface. I'd love to love Polyend's software, but M8 is so far ahead in terms of power and intuitiveness.
The interface for the original FM-1 firmware is pretty damn good.
The important thing about the alt firmwares is adding alternative and/or add new features.
But if you want to do FM synthesis, the other interfaces are just an opinion that is less integrated with the actual hardware side of the interface.
The fact that M-VAVE capitalized on a F/OSS synthesizer that has been well lauded as a great implementation of FM for a while should not be overlooked.
Other manufacturers could’ve done this. There are amazing F/OSS synth engines out there.
See also, the Zynthian hardware and the ZynAddSubFX synth.
They should send me a t-shirt. But in any case, thanks!
I think they namecheck you in AmySynth anyway for your FM Synth work.
I can't find it now, but somewhere off https://shorepine.github.io/amy/piano.html it talked about the Android work you did.
Edit: There is https://github.com/shorepine/alles#thank-you-to but I remember a more detailed thing too.
I always notice your name because I enjoyed Advogato back in the day and keep using bits of your work elsewhere.
Came here to look for M8 mentions. That firmware is just pure magic.
And, for those who missed it, Dirtywave M8 has recently been made available on iOS as a $30 app.
What excites me most about this, is alternative hardware running this firmware.
I love the idea of the polyend stuff but they're too pricy when there are perfectly usable trackers with more possibilities like renoise.
The novelty of a handheld tracker wears off quick once you start plugging things in.
Awesome! I don’t use any of their gear but still great news.
If only Ableton and Max would follow. Maybe that’s a weekend project.
Ableton is an overpriced piece of shmoo that will soon go away. It has over extended its welcome.
Ableton is my DAW of choice. I haven’t regretted the purchase of a license for it a single day in my life. Even though much of what I use it for would be equally doable probably in the “Lite” version of Ableton that came with several of the pieces of hardware that I have. I was initially using the Lite version and eventually pulled the trigger on upgrading after having been on Lite for more than a while.
Good for you, you might want to expand your horizon.
Just weighing in with my opinion: I started using DAWs with Cubase on an Atari ST. I've used everything. Cakewalk, ProTools, Reaper, Bitwig, Ardour, Studio One, Jeskola Buzz ;-) Music 2000 on a Playstation etc, etc. You name it and I've probably used it at least once.
Ableton is amazing. I keep coming back to it. I've used it as my daily driver since version 3 (pirated) and I've paid for it since version 6.
It would be awesome to have a Linux version (aside from the headless one in the Push 3 standalone) and it would be awesome to have a native SDK for device development, and it would be extra awesome if they open sourced it (never going to happen, but I can dream).
It's cool if you don't like it, but don't tell other people what they should or shouldn't use. You can offer alternatives, but just telling people they're wrong is arrogant and unhelpful.
I didn't say they should or shouldn't use it. I said clearly "you might want to expand your horizon".
Don't shove things I didn't say in my mouth and call me arrogant.
I'm secretly wishing for Ableton to not become FOSS, even though I probably couldn't survive without Ableton, and I'm also into FOSS. But I fear if Ableton would become FOSS, they'd just eat the entire DAW market, and it'd be impossible for new entries to even get the slightest of attention.
At least this way there are still cause for eyeing in other directions than Ableton.
I think logic will stick around. A lot of people want to stay in the Apple ecosystem. And doesn’t Pro Tools still has a grip on the professional studio market?
Maybe finally someone can take a look at the timing issues. This was a shitshow for a long time. Haha! At one point i think the tempo drifted between individual stems in an export?
Hopefully someone fixes the arpeggiator too. They made some implementation decisions that really messed it up for chiptune style stuff. (Retriggering the envelope on every arp step, not allowing for arbitrary chords(!))
I'm glad! It makes sense though: the community has been reverse engineering it and building their own with LLM help lately. I love my Tracker+, such a neat bit of kit, and I'm excited to see what we can do now the firmware is open
Exciting! I have a Tracker I need to update. I've also been seen stuff about Doom OS for the SP404 MK2, need to update that too.
Looks like my Tracker is getting promoted from drawer jockey to the main jamspot in my music setup, and I've got a weekend project to take on.
I love to see this new trend in the electrical musical implement industrial complex.
"Click to accept marketing cookies and enable this content" on a video? Have some shame, developers...
Note that this is a youtube embed. Polyend is at least transparent about youtube tracking.
That's not what the message says though. It implies using marketing cookies there, not externally. They could've said "Click to play from YouTube (may involve cookie tracking)" if it's actually for YouTube