NDSP on the Nano Cortex's infamous launch campaign: "We weren’t thinking, oh, people are gonna hate this.”

mbenigni said:
1b. There's an issue with their existing (plugin) codebase where it's extremely difficult to port or optimize code.
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Thats is no secret - IIRC Castro, or someone else from NDSP, once commented on this. Plugins were written for desktop CPUs, and this code is no easily reworked to run on embedded DSPs.

Then again, it's been over 4 years since launch...
 
laxu said:
Well, what they probably paid for those marketing videos could have possibly paid for an extra developer for one year at least.
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Yeah, I was going to make the point that it's a weird way to spend their budget. On the other hand, throwing bodies at an engineering problem isn't always a solution. (Especially if you can't find the right bodies.) There may be other gating items at play here.

And I'm sure NDSP, like any other company, spends wads of money on things we'd find questionable. Dumb videos, fat cigars, giant SOON signs for NAMM, etc. etc. etc. :D
 
mbenigni said:
Yeah, I was going to make the point that it's a weird way to spend their budget. On the other hand, throwing bodies at an engineering problem isn't always a solution. (Especially if you can't find the right bodies.) There may be other gating items at play here.
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I agree with that. Onboarding a new developer takes time, and finding the right talent in the first place can be a significant challenge.

You'd think NDSP would have a team working exclusively on new fx algorithms, amp models etc who aren't tied to e.g plugin porting. So it's baffling that their TINA seemingly has not produced anything more than a new Fender Deluxe Reverb since it was announced.
 
Lysander said:
Then again, they're selling QCs by the truckload, so wtf do i know. It works.
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I...

I might have given them some money, after swearing I never would.



** nervous cough **


Awkward No Way GIF
 
mbenigni said:
Yeah, I was going to make the point that it's a weird way to spend their budget. On the other hand, throwing bodies at an engineering problem isn't always a solution. (Especially if you can't find the right bodies.) There may be other gating items at play here.

And I'm sure NDSP, like any other company, spends wads of money on things we'd find questionable. Dumb videos, fat cigars, giant SOON signs for NAMM, etc. etc. etc. :D
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Absolutely true that most companies spend wads of money on self-serving, fairly unproductive whatever.

I think it's also true that many of those same companies grasp the concept of optics and wouldn't choose to make a splashy press run for the TINA amp modeling robot touting its speed.....when amp model development has slowed to an interminable crawl.

Or maybe not create splashy demo videos for every new "X" version of an existing plugin....when it simply reminds QC users (you know, the people who the X is for) that they won't be able to use said plugin for many, many months later.

I think these are rudimentary marketing/customer service concepts, and yet.....

I agree that throwing developer manpower or money at their situation probably wouldn't be helpful. If they have to release one bespoke firmware for every two plugins that get X-converted, something is frakked deeper in their engine development process anyway. That's a ridiculously inefficient way to code, and they have to know that.
 
mbenigni said:
1b. There's an issue with their existing (plugin) codebase where it's extremely difficult to port or optimize code.
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I'm not a developer but I would have thought once they figured out changes required for the first "X" plugins, it would be fairly straightforward for the rest. Woof.
 
Jarick said:
I'm not a developer but I would have thought once they figured out changes required for the first "X" plugins, it would be fairly straightforward for the rest. Woof.
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I would think that too, and maybe that is the case (we've gotten 4 in the past 6 months - maybe it's indicative of a faster pipeline. I'm not holding my breath though. I wouldn't be surprised if they just start timing them to make the best bang for their buck.
 
Jarick said:
I'm not a developer but I would have thought once they figured out changes required for the first "X" plugins, it would be fairly straightforward for the rest. Woof.
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It likely isn't if they have to overhaul the architecture of every plugin first to have it be compatible. Even if it's a lot of copy paste from previous work, it's still a lot of regression testing etc.
 
Jarick said:
I'm not a developer but I would have thought once they figured out changes required for the first "X" plugins, it would be fairly straightforward for the rest. Woof.
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I'm not sure they're porting the amps and effects at all. If they're releasing X plugins every couple of months and then have to pair each couple of them with a firmware update, it suggests to me that ad hoc, ground-up coding is happening in their ARM-based engine that the QC runs on.

The insane thing is that there now a lot of Snapdragon/ARM-based laptops out there from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc., so the PC plugins may have to be recoded yet again to ever work on those machines.
 
mikah912 said:
I'm not sure they're porting the amps and effects at all. If they're releasing X plugins every couple of months and then have to pair each couple of them with a firmware update, it suggests to me that ad hoc, ground-up coding is happening in their ARM-based engine that the QC runs on.

The insane thing is that there now a lot of Snapdragon/ARM-based laptops out there from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc., so the PC plugins may have to be recoded yet again to ever work on those machines.
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The silicon chips in Macs are ARM based though! And their plugins claim they run on AMD chips, so there's that.
 
Jarick said:
I'm not a developer but I would have thought once they figured out changes required for the first "X" plugins, it would be fairly straightforward for the rest. Woof.
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Depends on how homogeneous their code is across all of the legacy plugins. One possibility is that plugins developed over the course of several years, by several different developers, are likely to have unique coding nuances or idiosyncrasies that have to be teased apart and reverse-engineered by whoever's porting them.
 
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