How to Vibe Code Custom Firmware for Audio Gear

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase.

0:35And you get big purchasing power, so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2 % cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus. Terms apply. Losing weight can feel like a roller coaster, full of ups, downs, and being thrown for loops, like when someone brings donuts into the office, or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again. That's why there's Noom. They combine GLP-1s to quiet the food noise with healthy habits that help you keep it quiet, even if you get off the meds.

1:14Their program is designed to make weight loss a smooth ride, helping you understand what drives you, so you can build better habits to not just lose weight, but keep it off. Noom. Lose for keeps. Get started at Noom.com. Not all customers will clinically qualify for medications. Individual results may vary. You've got big plans for your money. You invest. You track. You plan ahead. But does your financial app actually help you decide what to do next? Quicken helps you go beyond balances and basic reports. Project your cash flow, dig into your investments, and use Quicken AI to understand what matters across your finances.

1:51With Quicken, you can make sense of your options and decide what to do next. Quicken. Know what to do next. See how at Quicken.com.

2:09Welcome to the DTNS Weekend Edition, gratefully provided to you for your support of this show. Thank you. I'm Jason Howell. And I know on the show a lot, we've been talking very recently about vibe-coded apps and specifically about how they are being, you know, vibe-coding is being used to like replace apps from notable companies like Adobe Photoshop, for example. You know, there's a whole bunch of these stories floating around right now. But you don't have to reverse engineer major corporate software. You could also do it for your own projects. You could also do it for music projects specifically.

2:53And I am a musician. I love the technology behind music, have for decades at this point. And I did not know that today's guest, Rich Straffolino, was so deeply ingrained into music tech as well. What's up, Rich? How's it going, Jason? Pleasure to be talking to talking tunes uh today i i am not a musician full disclosure i am what i would like to refer to as a synth dad uh i said there's a six if there's a 16 step sequence i can fiddle with for like an hour after the kids go to bed that's my comfort zone pretty much uh so give me a couple measures and a drum machine and i'm like i'm a very happy guy but i love music tech too um i could talk five pin midi like let's go like midi forever get that trs midi out here anyway but yes i i have been so it was so funny i was just listening where you guys were talking about the art craft stuff with uh with yeah dovi photoshop and stuff um and i have been i it made me realize like i've been hearing about either modded or custom firmware on synths now it like it literally is just in the week and a half has gone from oh i saw one project to it to i've installed it on one synth that i have to i'm creating my own like that's that's my timeline within about 10 days of realizing Already getting in there and creating your own firmware.

4:12Poorly. That's poorly. Let me do it. But, I mean, you're doing it. Yeah. It very much falls into that tinker philosophy of, you know, I can. Someone in my life is paying for a Claude Code account, so I might as well try and utilize that. But yeah, I kind of first became now like full disclosure, like reverse engineering and and modding firmware has a long history, both in music and tech. But they've very much been one off projects. The one I always think of is way back in the day, Canon cameras, when the Canon EOS M came out, which is like their first mirrorless camera, there was a magic lantern firmware that unlocked like raw video recording.

4:56It's like a super big deal on a very cheap, relatively cheap consumer camera. So like I don't want to say like this is the first time anyone has ever done this. But it's the first time you've just been able to throw a binary, not even a binary, throw a firmware file into CloudCode or your coding agent of choice and go reverse engineer this. Here's like figure out how this works. And it kind of just does it. Like that's the level where you're at right now. Yeah. It's kind of blowing my mind right now when I think about it. You know, I've got I. So first of all, you said you're not a musician. I would push back on that.

5:31I would say you've got a passion and interest for this and you play around and you do make music with it. Therefore, you are a musician, in my opinion. Like what define musician, right? Like is a musician someone who releases albums? And if you're anything less than that, you're not a musician. No, I don't believe that. So, you know, it sounds like you're interested in this technology enough to be pulled in the direction of playing around with it, making actual music. and something that you enjoy listening to at a later time, that I think qualifies you as a musician. So first and foremost, I look around my studio and I've got, what is this keyboard?

6:05You can't see it, but I got to get it right because it's one of my newest acquisitions here. It is a Kawaii K4, which is like a late 90s, old school synthesizer. And it has, I think like 64 presets in it. And through MIDI, you can dump new presets into it. I think it has also a card system or whatever. But it's such an old sense. Like a sysx file you can send over. Yes, exactly. And so that's been my only kind of exposure to modifying, if you want to call it that, hardware synths. I've got a few other synths around here that can do something similar. It's slightly inconvenient, right? Like as compared to when you were talking in pre-show about Logic, you know, Logic is the audio software that Apple creates and everything.

6:53Inside of software like that, it's very easy to just double click on a row of presets and boom, immediately you've got millions of sounds at your disposal. But a lot of these hardwares, they are limited to space and memory and technical capability. So on these pieces of hardware, I have to like have a piece of software on my Mac routed through MIDI over here, you know, going through my MIDI router into the keyboard. I have to have it in the right mode and I have to, you know, like balance and juggle between them. It's complicated enough that it isn't quite as nice as having it inside of a computer.

7:28But what you're talking about is kind of next level because then you're talking about reverse engineering firmware, dumping that into the machine to get not only new sounds but new capabilities, right? Yeah, totally, totally. And the one that's really blowing up in this regard, it's this – if you have searched for anything with synth-related on AliExpress, you have been served an ad. It's called the M-Vave FM1. It's not M-Wave. I thought that was a misspelling. It is because the M and the V together, it looks like a W anyway, but it is M-Vave. But it is this super cheap. You can find it for like 60 bucks, a little tiny FM synthesizer.

8:08If you don't know what an FM synthesizer is, if you've heard synthesizers in any 80s song ever, you've heard an FM synthesizer. The most famous one is the Yamaha DX7. famously an inscrutable synthesizer to program, which is why everybody just used the presets and you have heard the presets on every major 80s track ever. The one that comes to mind is like Jump by Van Halen, right? Like that is one of the most famous like stabs. All those synth stabs on that are pure DX7 stuff. So, but what this is, it's about the size of a paperback book. It is super cheap and it can literally run the exact same patches from the DX7, which is already cool, right?

8:46That is in and of itself cool. But what I have seen, there are a number of mod firmwares that have come. Interestingly, both open source and closed source. But when I'm just casually looking, I saw at least 50 that have been published on GitHub and readily available for download. A lot of these are based on the same projects. There are a couple of different projects. The most famous one is called Felucia or Felucia is or not most famous is very much an exaggeration, most popular one and a lot of ones that others are spinning off of. And what this does is essentially this what this does is it takes this from something that is essentially a synthesizer.

9:30It has like a very tiny little keyboard, but you could hook in a MIDI keyboard and just play it full size and have that functionality. It has a very basic sequencer, has some actually pretty decent effects on it from what I understand. but it's a fairly dedicated synthesizer system and allows you to turn it into a four-track groove box. So you could put a drum track on it. You could load your own samples on it. You could have a dedicated synth engine on it. You could maintain some of those FM capabilities. It effectively completely rewrites what this thing is able to do from kind of a more dedicated synth instrument into kind of a very tiny, like four tracks doesn't get you very far, but you can have some fun with it.

10:05Four track kind of all in one groove box. Sometimes limitation is a great thing to work inside of, especially music. I have a set of pocket operators over here that speak very loudly to that as well. But there's a couple other ones. Some of the other popular ones are Sloop, which is another one that everybody is kind of going off of. And then there is the closed source one that is the most popular is from a developer that goes by Baud Girl, I believe. It's technically called the FM1 Plus VA. And that one seems like they're trying to make a business model off of that good luck. when there's 50 other firmware, but by all accounts is very well regarded as well.

10:43I've seen a couple of different takes on that. But I mean, these go so far as you're rewriting the complete UI on this, right? The Baud Girl one is kind of the FM1+. It adds what's called a VA synth, a virtual analog synth, which is just another type of sound of synthesis. FM synth is notoriously kind of cold and can be metallic-y sounding. virtual analog synth that gives you brings you that kind of that warmth in there so again more tonal possibilities more tonal shaping but again these are extraordinarily low cost an extraordinarily low cost uh synthesizer and i thought the reason that this blew up actually i was doing some research into it i thought the reason this blew up a lot of these less expensive or smaller synths run on um what are these basically microcontrollers right so like the teens i think they're called teensy chips or like a Raspberry Pi Zero or something like that.

11:38This actually runs on like an old karaoke mic chip or something like, like it's, it's not even, it's not even a popular microcontroller. So people are just going to town and having fun with it, which is kind of awesome. I love that. Yeah. And leading up to this, I came across very, very randomly last night. I was just doing my, my typical evening time Reddit browsing and came across a link to a GitHub page called Awesome Music Gear Firmware. And it just lists, you know, this is kind of, in essence, what we're talking about here. We're not just focusing entirely on the M-Vave FM1, which is kind of what kicked this off.

12:16But if you're watching the video version, you can see there is a whole slew of hardware manufacturers, devices, all of these that you see on the screen. I don't know. There's probably close to 50 different devices and manufacturers listed here. um carrying their own list of custom firmware that you can go ahead and just bloop right onto the device and if you feel comfortable with it and completely change things up again not just the sound not just the sounds that are there but in many cases how it operates start to finish uh you know top to bottom new capabilities um you know piano roll visual visualizers that weren't there initially and then you see it this way and you're like well why wasn't that there initially because that actually makes a ton of sense well yeah and i would divide these into kind of two different camps where it's this thing is missing a feature either because the manufacturer didn't think to implement it or yeah you know maybe purposely excluding that as part of an upgrade path not even purposely but that is in their upgrade possibly on the base possibly purposefully if you talk to Electron, probably purposely, but the so the idea of, oh, I just wanted that one feature.

13:29Boom, I like this. And now I just had this one feature. Whereas what's interesting about the M-Vave stuff is it's a lot of that is complete rewrite, right? Is that a complete rethinking of what that machine is actually capable of? And I think, well, I mean, I would imagine we would see more of that depending on the platform. I think that's just a perfect combination of extraordinarily cheap and extraordinarily, like like relatively capable synthesizer for that. A lot of these are very low power machines, like when you're, I mean, compared to a phone or something like that. But where I think the magic in this is, because like you mentioned, there's Logic, which has a trillion presets.

14:07There's preset packs you can buy. On my phone, there's an amazing, by the way, app called Koala Sampler. If anybody wants to get like a very cheap sampler, the amazing app that is a full featured, um like roland sp level sampler uh that is just exceptional great effects you could do anything that you want with that but your the ui is a phone you can actually put a midi controller on it but to me like it the where it hits the limit is like interacting with a phone for music is good if that's all you have but like a lot of the joy of tooling around with this kind of stuff and the reason i don't work in a daw like a ton other than like maybe more for mastering and stuff like that is for, I like having some sort of interface to go off of.

14:52And that's kind of why it's exciting for these very low-powered devices, relatively, I would imagine relatively simple code. I mean, again, if you want to talk about, if I'm a musician, I'm 100 % not a developer. But the idea of taking some modest capabilities with a good UI and kind of bringing extra functionality to that is kind of amazing. Yeah, super amazing. Let's take a quick break and let's talk about that because you have, you know, you've played around with, you say you're not a developer and I totally get you. I'm not either, but you don't need to be a developer. And that's kind of the point because now we have these models that will do a lot of that work for you.

15:34And so what is a developer is another thing that's really transforming and morphing right now. We're going to talk about that on the other side of this break. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT Work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files, and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step. For example, ChatGPT Work can gather team feedback from Slack and use it to suggest updates to a project brief in Google Docs.

16:09You stay in control reviewing the draft and deciding what moves forward. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value.

16:49Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. You've got big plans for your money.

17:24You invest. You track. You plan ahead. But does your financial app actually help you decide what to do next? Quicken helps you go beyond balances and basic reports. Project your cash flow, dig into your investments, and use Quicken AI to understand what matters across your finances. With Quicken, you can make sense of your options and decide what to do next. Quicken. Know what to do next. See how at Quicken.com. 500 orders a month was manageable. 5 ,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place.

18:02would use to take five separate tools ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days.

18:21All right, so you've got, do you, now, first of all, do you have the MVAV or do you, you have an Electron device, is that right? Or am I mistaken? I do. Yes, I have a couple of things that I've tooled around with. So right now I have the Model Cycles, which is a really cool, another FM-based instrument. This is more of a drum machine, kind of a groove box that can do some pads and stuff like that. So you can kind of get a full feature. Yeah. What does that cost? Which is kind of their entry-level drum machine kind of thing. This runs New 300, or it did. Price has probably gone up. but you can get them used for significantly less than that.

18:59But it's a very cool little six track FM based drum groove box kind of thing. And it's great. Like the reason you buy an electron device is they have the most deep and detailed sequencer you will ever find. So you can do weird conditional triggers. So a note like a pattern will only play if a certain set of sequences before that is played and you can set it to only play once and you can set probabilities when it will play. It's an amazing device. You kind of need a dictionary and a manual to learn how to use it is extraordinarily deep. But that's great. But because it's entry level, there are some things that Electron holds out for their more expensive stuff.

19:37The Syntact would kind of be the or the Digitone, maybe something like that would be kind of the step up from this. Those are much more professional kind of tools. But what I found was that there is a community called the Cycles Modded, which has modified the official firmware for this and has brought over some of the Syntac engines over to it so you can get access to different configurable sounds. They're not quite as morphable as they would be on some of their high-end machines. You do have hard CPU limits. That's usually the limiting factor on there. But it's also added the ability to add a dedicated sampler to that, which is something you can resample actually the things from your...

20:18So you can record a pattern, essentially record it to the sampler, then play it back so you can add more uh more tracks to it essentially yeah more layers to your sound kind of all in one which is really cool and add effects to that and stuff like that it also uh added multi-track uh usb audio out it used to be over a usb into your daw you'd only be able to do two tracks with the modification oh that's so great like that's amazing right like that completely changes i will say the one thing i do wish that they could change it obviously this can't be modded in software, it uses micro USB, which to me is kind of gallant.

20:53That is one of the downsides, right? And especially also with the MVAV, right? When we're talking about this device and we're talking about MIDI, you know, MIDI for those, you know, and I guess we're talking about a lot of this stuff, assuming that some of you know the music terminology, but MIDI, I mean, has been around for literal decades at this point. And it's essentially the technology that allows you to sync up multiple audio devices together and also control different aspects of it. So a synth might have 16 different sounds and you could route one channel of MIDI to one sound and another channel of MIDI to another and on the same keyboard control multiple sounds at once.

21:30So MIDI is this like complicated, but relatively simple considering the fact that it was designed like developed like 40 or 50 years ago. I don't even know how many, how long ago at this point. It's amazing that it's still the technology for doing this primarily. but one of the downsides of these smaller devices, I don't know if I can get a rear looking shot of some of these things, is the fact that because they're tiny and the MIDI cable is actually a pretty, you know, it's like a nickel size. It's a chunky boy. That these smaller devices don't have the normal size MIDI. So you need to have like a conversion cable of some sort or you're using it specifically through like USB-C or maybe USB-A on older devices to go into your computer.

22:16And so you lose a little bit of that, I mean, the immediacy of that interoperability. But there are ways. There are ways if you are smart enough to kind of route them into your traditional music setup and get around it. It requires a little forethought and having the right gear or the right cable to make that happen. MIDI is a beautiful standard that is extraordinarily well thought out for given how old it is. but you can tell it was made in the eighties by how kludgy it can also be with, there is different, you know, in, out, through there's, don't get me started on MIDI CC is like the most inscrutable thing.

22:51Don't, don't even try to like, if you, if you've never, don't know what MIDI is, don't look up MIDI CC. It is the most weird thing of all time. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Now I'm showing the, the, the kind of the blown up version of the back of the M-Vave and you can kind of These are probably like the really small eighth-inch headphone port size plugs, and then you got your USB-C. And so you're limited. When we're talking about standard audio gear, like in a professional studio, most of them are going to have that nickel-sized MIDI out, and it's going to be real plug-and-play and really easy for anyone to do.

23:27This is going to require a little bit more work. Yeah, and again, those are kind of the creature – I don't even want to call them creature comforts. Those are the things when you talk about professional gear versus more consumer grade gear. And especially at this price point, you're talking about having individual audio outs for each of your sound sources. So you can then route them through different effects chains and stuff like that. That's why the MIDI out stuff with the model cycles is so cool because, yes, I don't have the actual audio outs that I can put into a mixer. But I can put that into Logic or any kind of DAW.

23:57And then it gives you a lot more sound shaping flexibility going forward, which is really, really cool. It does have some pretty decent outs. I mean, you get stereo outs and a headphone jack and stuff like that on there. Again, that micro USB. I was going to say, that's an ugly port right there. Yeah, it's so upsetting. It doesn't even look like it's in it. I can't even. Don't even get me started. But anyway, so that was kind of my, that was the first time. And there's like a web-based flasher. Basically, like you plug it in. I don't even think you need to reboot the machine. You just like plug it in, adjust one setting.

24:31It flashes it from a web browser. You kind of select which mods you want. It just puts them on there. Like the whole process of the modded cycles, they changed the boot up animation, which is just cute and adorable. So the whole process of it was just so simple and so well thought out. And in terms of stability, even the features they have listed as experimental, now your mileage may vary from all of these different projects. In my experience, even the experimental features seem to be rock solid in terms of stability. Some of the workflow stuff gets weird because, again, they don't have buttons for certain things that didn't ship with the device.

25:07So you kind of have to learn a new muscle memory. Totally. I mean, a lot of times on surfaces like this, even if it isn't a modded UI, there is a limited number of buttons and UI knobs and stuff to interact with. And so the layers of menus can tend to go deep per controller. And so, you know, it's almost like you have to, like you said, you have to learn the language of the hardware and get that muscle memory up in order to really get the most out of it. If you just pick it up one time and spend an hour with it, you're really just scratching the surface. And your frustration of dealing with those layers and not knowing where to go and everything might turn you away.

25:51It really does require you to kind of like dedicate a little bit to it. Jason, it kind of goes back to what you're saying with sometimes, you know, your limitations, right, can be freeing. A lot of times a limited device is also a very immediate device, right? So I have a drum machine called the Drum Brute. It's an analog drum machine. Like you probably can't really do anything with firmware too much on that, but it's also the most immediate fun thing. And I can get that spun up and I'm grooving and rocking out on that in about five minutes. You can kind of figure out 90 % of the functionality extraordinarily quickly.

26:24knob per function, which is always very nice on a music device, but it sacrifices a little bit in terms of depth of sound and depth of capability, not even depth of capability, but depth of sound, certainly for that. But when it comes to modding stuff, what I've started creating for my own is I have a device also called the Polyend Tracker, which is a really cool, I don't know if you know, if you're not familiar with the tracker is, it's basically, I believe it has its roots in video game music composition but essentially you're creating music through a spreadsheet uh for lack of a term here i will i will hold it up now that we are full screen there um it's glorious oh it's so pretty it has a nice jog wheel uh right here to navigate everything if it would get in focus thank you camera yeah and i mean it's not tiny like it could be a lot smaller no they actually sell a tracker mini actually but oh okay the idea with it is uh it's a track so it's like it's pretty decent for like kind of an all-in-one thing.

27:22It's basically a sampler that you, that just has a very particular kind of workflow to, to go through it. And like I said, it's, it's kind of spreadsheet based for lack of a better term. But I love working with it. It's a very, I find it very immediate and very useful, but there were some features like the, the one thing that I wanted this thing to be able to do, it has a performance menu. So you can add all sorts of effects. You can add bit crush and delay and all this fun stuff. Doing a filter sweep on this thing was borderline impossible without like multiple button combinations yeah it's got a huge knob that should be really yeah make that super satisfying yeah so when i found i found two things i found the project um reverse engineer anything on github which is like an npc thing you plug into your your ai agent and it's essentially gathering together a bunch of reverse engineer tooling kind of all together and creates kind of a workflow for that i threw open the most current tracker firmware and i said help me reverse engineer this i want to add a dj style, you know, kind of sweeping filter that can go from, you know, low end cut to high end cut.

28:24And I just want to be able to do that. And it took about a day, but of mostly me casually checking back in on it and going, did this work? Did this work? Um, it was, yeah, yeah, it was not flawless. Uh, I had a couple of failed boots. Uh, first off, I made sure that there was the, there was a solid recovery. I would make sure like before you even mess with anything, Make sure that the recovery process for this is one, easy, and two, that nothing gets kind of written to memory initially, that there's always like a saved state in ROM to go back to that you can go through there. And usually your AI agent probably will be able to help you research if that's possible, but it would be the first thing I would 100 % check.

29:06But I was able to implement a kludgy version of a DJ-style filter. or it has like a weird button combo. I need to rethink how the button combo works on it. But I hold down two buttons and I twist that knob and it goes from the high end cut to the low end cut while it's playing. CPU usage is no problem. And I can sound like a mediocre DJ kind of cutting the low end off there and everything gets real whompy and transy and stuff like that or psyche. It's like so cool. And I absolutely, like, I was like, that's great. Is the UI pretty? Nope. It's just like a window that opens up with the percentage of cutoff that you're putting on there.

29:42But in terms of audio processing, it sounds great, works great. And I was super thrilled to put that together. I mean, when it comes to development of hardware and user experience and all that, I imagine one way of thinking about it would be get the feature working first. Oh, hey, yay, we've proven that the synth can do the thing that we want it to do. The experience is not great. So now let's focus on that. And that might be the next thing that you throw against the agent, you know? Yeah, well, I see. I immediately started biting off more than I could chew because I started seeing. It's pretty easy to do.

30:17Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I had a friend. I was sharing all this with Slack, and he just goes like, you've created a monster in yourself. I was like, yeah. But I ported over an actual synth engine to this because, like I said, this is all sample-based. Sample-based just means it's playing basically like an audio file of a sound. Yeah. It's not actually synthesizing the sound. They may sound like it doesn't make much of a difference. It a little bit does. But there is an open source macro synthesizer. Don't worry about what that means. Just means it makes sound called Braids, which is very popular. And I was actually able to figure out an implementation for that.

30:49Again, UI is very kludgy. Right now I'm running, though, into CPU limits. This thing has a fairly low end. It's like a Cortex-M4 runs like 160 megahertz or something like extraordinarily slow by most other computing standards processor. and so you're kind of running into okay if i'm going to do this i need to limit the amount of tracks i'm going to use or i need to turn off delay and reverb because those eat into your your cpu cycle so like now i'm making design decisions yeah about this if i want this like it's it's and i i have some sympathy for like oh i wish they had this feature i was like well it turns out with this hardware they would have either had to make the device more expensive to add a more expensive cpu or they would have had to take away other features make it maybe a six track, it's an eight track or something.

31:33So I actually have some sympathy now for - You start to understand the trade-offs. 100%. Yeah, you start to understand. Okay. This has me going in a different direction. We are going to take a break. On the other side of that, I want to ask you how you keep from totally destroying your machine in the process of going down this rabbit hole. So hang tight. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back.

31:57This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they sack. That's technology at Capital One. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile.

32:36With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details.

32:57All right. So we're talking about modifying firmware in... My dog has something he's not supposed to have. I look over and he's got like this rag that he's just now bit holes through. It's okay. He's eaten a couple of tennis balls in his lifetime so far. So that's peanuts by comparison, almost literally. How do you keep from destroying this wonderful piece of hardware that you spent$300 on? Is that even possible? Sometimes I think I'm firmly implanted in the Android world and have been since the beginning. And in the early days of Android, if you wanted a phone that did more than what was offered, you had to root it and then you would flash a new ROM on it.

33:38And there was always the possibility that that flashing process went horribly awry and you brick your device and you're screwed. Unless you figure out or meet the right person who knows more than you do, that device is now permanently bricked. Is that possible with these audio devices? I'm sure it is. I 100 % am sure it is. That being said, if it's designed to be software upgradable in general, there is usually a graceful fallback to that. There is some sort of master boot. I'm thinking about it in a computer, right? You have like a bootloader before it loads the OS. Yes. Essentially, a lot of these have like an update bootloader that's hard coded in.

34:21You can't write over it. So even if you completely mess it up, there's usually a way to kind of invoke that read the good known good file from an SD card or from a USB connection and then go from there. I particularly one of the reasons I started with the tracker one it was the most I use it the most so it was the thing I wanted to to kind of experiment I knew the best and I knew what I wanted out of it but also polyend has a very good recovery tool that allows you kind of load a firmware image from your computer over USB it's very simple it allowed me to also kind of iterate and flash stuff very quickly also which is kind of nice without having to move SD cards in and out constantly um but so so that one i knew was kind of very relatively safe for that i would say though like in the back of my mind like the the the model cycles the way the update process was i was not worried because essentially it's what all it's doing is pushing actually a sysx file a very sophisticated sysx file uh to the machine to to invoke a lot of those changes the fact that it didn't need to get rebooted i was very confident that that wouldn't hurt it right yeah Yeah, there you're not talking full top to bottom.

35:30Yes. But anytime you're doing something, I mean, I went into it knowing that like, all right, if I completely brick this, I have accepted that this is a remote but not zero possibility. And if I don't have it, then, well, at least I got my model cycle so I can groove out on that. I would be sad, certainly. um but i would say if you're going to look into this one do your research and what the recovery state looks like older gear particularly like one a lot of older gear probably is isn't designed to be software upgradable like it's it's much more it would be much more of your your circuit bending right at that point to modify your instrument um but i would say make sure that there is like a it has a recovery tool or like a hard reset button that'll set it back to factory settings and also just kind of like, would I do this on a Digitex or would I do this on like an Octatrack that costs thousands of dollars?

36:27No, I definitely wouldn't do that. I wonder if people are doing it on those high end. I guess to a certain degree, they probably are. Yeah, and benefit from their work perhaps before you, or be comfortable knowing that you could, this is very experimental for sure. Yeah. And I mean, this is really just an example of or, you know, shining a spotlight on where we are with ownership of devices like these, not just in music, but I'm sure there are other analogies to compare it against. You mentioned digital cameras or DSLRs and stuff. We're in a time right now where this kind of modern era of AI and agents and now reverse engineering, we're only starting to scratch the surface of what that actually means for the everyday user.

37:21There have always been people who were smart enough developers to have an idea to do something like this and then to go in and really just like, you know, based on their own knowledge and expertise and everything, scratch away at the code to get it to do that. And, hey, I just created an alternative firmware. Now we're suddenly at this point where because of the modern state of AI and these agents and everything that they're growing so capable, you can just kind of have an idea of something and just be like, well, you know, I saw this over there. I wonder if it's possible to get this piece of hardware to do this sort of thing.

37:58And it might take you a little while to get there. But, you know, were you able to even get anywhere close to that based on knowledge alone prior to these tools? I know for myself, no, hell no. And I wouldn't spend the time to do it either. I'd just be like, that's just not a great use of my time. But now this is a new type of creativity. Although some people would push back on that and be like, well, you're not being creative. It's doing all the work. But you are coming up with the idea. And you are, in essence, from that germ of an idea, creating something that didn't exist before using these tools.

38:31And so it is a form of creativity. It's just a really exciting time around ownership of devices like these. There has never been a time where you could more directly tie intent to execution, right? Like that's what's exciting. That's how I always think of AI is like their intent approximation machines, right? And your frustration with them comes in how close they get in, how close they approximate that intent. In this case, they're approximating that intent extraordinarily well. and to me it's like if if that prevents me from upgrading to the tracker plus you know or buying another machine or or i get new use out of old hardware for a variety of that just synths and stuff like i can bring new life to this because it i'm not blaming any of the manufacturers here after a while it doesn't make sense if you're not manufacturing this thing to invest resources into upgrading software for no return you know like i i get that as a business um it's it's just cool that these tools exist.

39:29And there are communities also that are kind of working together to, especially with that Envave thing. It's just absolutely insane. Yeah, I mean, what it makes me think is we're kind of entering into seemingly, whether intentional or not, entering into a world where a company could create the hardware and be like, look, the software that is here is kind of not the point. The point is we created this hardware with this open kind of playground inside of it, all of these capabilities, it's up to you to figure out how everything on the surface ties into that hardware in creative ways. And that's kind of what we're looking at with the MVAV, right?

40:08Like you wouldn't want to release that hardware and just be like, it does absolutely nothing. You get to make it make something. You want to give them a default layout, a default set of capabilities. But I'm envisioning a company that does this very intentionally to be like, We know where technology is right now. We've created this playground of hardware and inside and out for you to get creative with and to intentionally, as users, create the audio hardware that you want out of it. There is a company that is – I'm sure there are more than one. The one that I'm aware of that is closest to that, in my mind, is a synth maker called Bastl.

40:48I believe they're out of Eastern Europe. Don't quote me specifically where. But they make a series of, I believe they call them the Basel Castle. It's a platform, really. And they have three distinct products there, right? So it's like a sampler. It's an effects processor. And it's like a little synth engine. But they all use the exact same hardware platform. And they allow you to swap the firmware already. You just swap the faceplate so that the controls all stay the same, you know, are all consistent and stuff like that. That's their Gen 1 you're showing here. They have a Gen 2, but it's the same approach for both.

41:20They're, yeah, the Alchemist and the Wave Bard and stuff like that. But what's cool is they've open sourced all of the firmware underneath there, and you can go in and create your own firmwares and stuff like that. And it has a bunch of crazy patch points on there. It has some built-in stuff. I was looking. I was actually looking. I've never played with one myself. I've always kind of wanted to get my hands on one because it's like a fun little toy. I'm a synth dad. But I wanted to – I was researching on how to turn one into a Benjolin, which is this weird experimental feedback machine kind of thing.

41:52And it evidently seems like it would be relatively simple to implement with this. So I'm very excited to see companies like that doing exactly what you were just saying, Jason. It's like, hey, here's some UI elements. Figure out what you want to do with them. Right. And by the way, if you're using Cloud or you're using OpenA or ChatGPT or whatever, here's like our stock starter skill. That kicks off the process and whatever. There's a lot of ways that this could go and probably will. Maybe we're giving some companies some ideas right now. Who the heck knows? Rich, I love that you started this off saying I'm not a musician and that you just dumped music knowledge for like 40 minutes on me.

42:32I think that you are. This is the same nerd technology. Don't sell yourself short. Yeah, no. I would love sometime to hear what you're coming up with this stuff. because it's, yeah, I love that these, I love where we're at right now to just kind of round things out. I love where we're at right now with music technology because I mean, I don't know at what age or time you got involved with this stuff. I started playing with this stuff back in the 90s when like my first music system was a Tascam four track recorder, you know, and talk about working inside of limitations. You know, I created, I have a whole box full of cassettes that are full of four-track recordings that me and my friend, we would battle it out with each other trying to record as many songs as possible in this incredibly limited scenario.

43:20Meanwhile, at that time, if you wanted anything close to what we have access to now, you had to work in a multi-million dollar recording studio to get access to any of that stuff. And now technology is such that things have shrunk down. Access has been democratized by and large. I mean, it's to where you buy a computer and immediately once you open the computer out of the box, you basically have a recording studio and all the things that back when I was a teenager, I would have killed to have. So it's just such a cool time for music creativity. We all have the ability to be a musician, whether we want to call ourselves a musician or not.

43:59So it's pretty cool stuff. I appreciate the words of inspiration, Jason. There you go. Well, Rich, thank you so much for coming up with the idea to talk about this stuff. I, like you, I do like you, but I, like you, would talk about this stuff for days. This stuff is infinitely inspiring to me, and I love seeing how other people are working with music technology, so we should do this again sometime. Absolutely. Let's talk about Eurorack next time, okay? Let's go. I would love to talk about Eurorack. I have never played around with one, but I've always wanted to, and some of my heroes do, And so, yeah, we should definitely do that.

44:37Let's get that on the calendar. If people want more of what you do, where should they go? You can just follow me on Blue Sky at Mr. Anthropology or any social platform at Mr. Anthropology. You can also find my work at CISOseries.com. It's more for security leaders, but if you want cybersecurity headlines, I host that. Department of Know, we do every Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, which is me talking with two security leaders about the news of the week, kind of getting their inside perspective, helping understand what it means to security teams. Check that out. It's on the CISO Series YouTube channel every Friday, 4 p.m.

45:10Eastern. Fantastic. It sounds like you are well-rehearsed in giving your load down. Oh, yes. CISO Series. I was on that a couple of months ago. Thank you for the invite. It's excellent, excellent work that you guys are doing over there. As far as those of you listening, if you are thinking about anything in particular and you have some insight into what we're talking about here or ideas for what we should talk about. Share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can learn more about the entire family of DTNS podcasts and shows by going to DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can go to YouTube.com slash DailyTechNewsShow and see them for your eyeballs as well.

45:48And, you know, if you like what you hear, consider supporting us at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Thanks again, Rich. I'm Jason Howell, and we'll see you next time on Daily Tech News show. Weekend edition. Bye, everybody.

46:14The DT &S family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

46:27Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI.

47:02They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.