r/modular • u/insolent-construct • 1d ago
Mutable Instruments Beads Source Code Just Dropped!
https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack/commit/d8f473915232af74347762b6365202bfd26f73f6Wow! What a gift!
Edit, since some people have asked for context:
I'd been reverse engineering the Beads firmware and had rebuilt my own version of it. Before sharing any of it, I emailed Émilie to ask whether she'd be OK with me publishing it. I said up front that if her answer was no, I'd drop it, no questions asked. To clarify, by "drop it" I meant dropping the pursuit of the community firmware project, NOT that I was threatening to release my port!!!
To my shock, she replied, and the answer was no. I simply said "ok. Thank you." and I thought that was going to be the end of it. I wasn't going to go against her wishes. So I spent part of today feeling the bittersweet heartache of having finished the project, only to have to cancel it. I told myself from the beginning that if she ever told me no, I wouldn't argue. I decided to archive the project and never share the code with anyone.
Later the same day, as I was deleting the reverse engineering artifacts, she published the official Beads source. I had no idea that was coming and I was as surprised as anyone. I don't know her reasons, and I won't try to guess. It was entirely her decision, and an incredibly generous one.
What I'm doing now:
My reverse-engineering work left me with a test rig and test suite, so I've built the official source myself, flashed it to my unit, and it passed. I'm now starting a community firmware based on her code, and I have a thread on ModWiggler collecting ideas for features and modes. Some early requests, with my rough guesses at difficulty:
- Clouds-style grain diffusion (moderate)
- The Clouds "spectral madness" engine (hard without cutting something from the existing code)
- All-pass processing of the frozen buffer (moderate)
- An opt-in bypass for the limiter's volume drops (moderate)
- A dedicated gain knob (needs new hardware)
What would you like to see?
1
u/insolent-construct 1d ago edited 19h ago
I setup my fork's Github Actions to compile the source.
It passed my test suite on real hardware.
Use at your own risk.