We are watching this thread, and the items listed will be considered for future iterations of Voltage Modular. But I also need to be clear about a few other things.
- We are not working on the next major version of Voltage Modular at this time. We have some roadmap concepts, and plenty of good ideas exist in this thread and elsewhere (mostly from developers, we note). But a major version with significant features while maintaining backward compatibility with a massive number of modules is no small thing.
- As I said, the list is good and valuable. There is no need to prioritize it. That is indeed our job. Only we can judge what is possible in our platform and what features make sense, both technical challenges and market value.
- Voltage Modular is not abandoned. There have been two updates since the release of 2.5 last year, and twelve updates since the release of 2.0. We run several promotions each year, and Marketing continues to feature VM, the developers, and their modules on social media, the website, and the newsletter. If we did not care, there are more effective ways to kill a product. There has been absolutely
zero discussion here about allowing VM to languish. We acknowledge that users in this business often equate a lack of major annual (at least) updates to "end of life." We just don't accept it.
- All those efforts take time and resources, and Voltage Modular and VM Designer represent about 10% of the catalog. As you say, Gus, "There is a good little Voltage Modular community to grow." Yes, it is little, but we still do what we can to grow it. The fact is that, just like the hardware market, the virtual modular market is a fraction of the entirety of what we'll call the desktop music market. We allocate our time and resources accordingly.
- We are still a small company with a small development team. The developers pay attention to this forum, the Facebook groups, and the items that Support and Marketing make sure they should see. Bugs and suggestions do go into our database and are tracked.
- But they do not necessarily have time to come into this thread and interact. This is why we don't hang on the Discord server. We regret that, but it's just a fact. We release about ten products a year and may do the same this year. We're working on multiple products at once. The development team has to be allowed to focus on what they do best. We appreciate that you started and maintain this thread in the forum we host, but that doesn't come with a promise that we'll meet your expectations about involvement.
- I'm sorry that some feel that we do not engage enough with our customers and that we have to "step up." We're going to have to agree to disagree. Frankly, I spend too much of my personal time engaging with Cherry Audio's customers on social media, email, YouTube, and other forums to accept your position. I'm not complaining. I love my job and our customers, fans, and partners. I think you're possibly viewing this through the narrow silo of Voltage Modular, which is just a portion of Cherry Audio's business. I understand that VM is the topic at hand here. But there is no single Voltage Modular developer, support team, or marketing team. There is Cherry Audio.
- We update (for free, of course) all of our products (including Voltage) with new features and to keep up in what seems to be the never-ending race of operating system and processor changes. That is not free, that is not easy, that is not profitable. But it's necessary for our business, for the developers, and for the users. Another macOS update is coming, and we want to avoid a repeat of the Ventura situation we dealt with last year.
- As others have "noted," there's little point in
me coming in here and saying "noted" on a semi-regular basis
That doesn't mean I'm not reading and noting. If I'm quiet, I'm probably busy doing the weekly newsletter, posting new content to the website, interacting on social media as Cherry Audio, or working on projects with the other team members.
I don't know if this puts anyone's mind at ease. For some, I suspect that nothing short of an announcement of Voltage Modular 3.0 with half the features in this thread would do that. But with the release of Novachord + Solovox behind me and the next thing in front of me, I at least wanted to add a frank reply that acknowledged that we're paying attention even if we can't meet the expectations on our level of engagement.
In the meantime, please keep them coming. There's no such thing as feedback that isn't valuable. Just keep in mind that we often have to weigh the suggestions from a different perspective.
We could just keep banging away, most likely with the same result, or we could adapt to a different method. 