Polyend releases the Tracker firmware source code
polyend.comThis 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.
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 ..
> SoundArt Chameleon?
That's the one! glad to hear yours is still going strong! Come to think of it, it's probably ready for a new lease of life if you let your coding agents go wild.
Yes indeed, the Chameleon has been sitting in the rack for just this moment! :)
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.
Yup. I remember the Yamaha TX16W sampler whose software was so horribly hostile that someone developed an alternative OS called Typhoon.
As you mention, the FM-1 blew up thanks to the plethora of different firmware options that suddenly appeared, and it’s interesting that Behringer just announced new units (Kick and Ignite) with open firmware too.
This new paradigm makes me happy.
> This new paradigm makes me happy.
Out of all the agentic dev things... vibecoding synth firmware might be the best outcome, so far.
It's this, and also LLM-assisted reverse engineering of things that in an ideal world might've been open from the start.
Responding to myself with a correction:
I made an apparently common mistake:
My mistake: MWAVE or M-WAVE
Real name: M-VAVE FM-1
The latter will get you more stock listings on Ali and elsewhere. There cannot be a better stocking stuffer for anyone who is synth-curious.
FM is less beginner friendly than subtractive in part because of non-linear relationships between parameters and in part because there is not a culture of baby’s-first-synth tutorials…I mean even Yamaha’s two operator FM synths are unpredicable.
Or to put it another way, FM is half of RTFM.
As someone who once had a Nord Micro Modular, I completely agree.
However, Tally Ho into the future of open source firmware. Can you imagine what we could have done back in the day if we had these software tools?
I mean, 30 years ago that Nord Micro was all about subtract synthesis in the UI, but it was digital all underneath.
Good news everyone! The FM-1 now has subtractive synth firmwares.
Modern tools typically would not work on 1990’s digital instruments to the degree those tools often work on later instruments.
1990’s microcontrollers frequently use mask rom which is baked in at manufacturing and often aren’t installed with a means to dump that code on production instruments.
Also, 1990’s instruments often use gate arrays for the design logic and these are also burned in at manufacture.
So reverse engineering is more likely to require decapping and gate level implementation and probably won’t be some dissasembly and generic emulation.
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."> 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.
Shipping costs these days mean I do not even take advantage of warranties for most goods. The round trip cost for anything large or heavy often can represent a large portion of the original cost for many things.
No, I just add the brand to my List of Companies That Will Live in Infamy. Sony, Samsung, HP, Dell… the list is extremely long at this point. They have all produced inexcusably bad products that I had the misfortune of purchasing, and they will never see another dime from me or from anyone else wise enough to heed my advice to avoid them.
> Shipping costs these days mean I do not even take advantage of warranties for most goods. The round trip cost for anything large or heavy often can represent a large portion of the original cost for many things.
So for you is just better that you have a product that doesn't work properly, because shipping costs more than the value you lose from that thing not working? Do I understand this correctly?
If I buy a 2K synthesizer, that thing better work 100%, I'm not sure in what world someone would have to live in to not have that fixed...
> No, I just add the brand to my List of Companies That Will Live in Infamy
Cool... What does this have to do with the out-of-warranty repairs almost any instrument-maker offers already?
Does the board come with a jtag interface to unbrick the device?
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.
> possibly making newer models less appealing
Amidst the understandable joy, one thing I've seen almost no discussion about: the change in the incentive to research and develop new algorithms.
Most of the new firmwares are re-implementing familiar synth algs into new places. Almost as quickly, aything new that comes out will instantly get cloned to every other device.
Pending strategy, I've frozen release on my newest instrument.
Like open source software, people feel entitled to everything for free. And plenty are feeling vengeful of designers/companies for withholding alg development. This results in rationalization to defend in some cases piracy.
It's nice that "music wants to be free" and that people can dream up new sounds, but this is challenging for new designs. Say Roland comes up with a new technique "WaveZorb." A few audio examples, an afternoon playing it into an LLM and poof, it's like Doom, available on any instrument. Who needs to buy a WaveZorb anymore? Then, Korg invents "FiltFountain," sells three of them, and the alg is on everyone else's device faster than it can physically ship.
It's not worth fighting, but thinking about: The path forward is to gray goo. With little to differentiate any instrument from another. And little support or incentive to make any new synthesis algorithms.
I think this will do extraordinary damage to the digital audio market. I just see floods of slop VST plugins now on instagram, and we will have unlimited slop firmwares to navigate too.
Its going to be very hard to compete, and therefore will be less attractive for innovators
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 ;)
Correct, it's rather hypocrite. As if music-creation is superior to writing code. Also, the current "AI technology kills music" reminds me a lot of "sampling kills music" and before that "drumcomputers and synthesizers are not real instruments, and thus electronic dance-music (house, techno) is not real music". Even acknowledged professional music journalists seem to unable to differentiate between Suno-style generative music, and using AI-based tools for creative purposes in a creative and novel way.
(On a sidenote: and even Suno can be used in "correct" ways, as long as money and rights flow the right ways, like Arthur Baker said in his interview with ?uestlove, where he was describing how he would hire musicians and tell them what to play and how, and is saying "what's the difference with Suno?"
one thing for sure, we are all being hit by a huge wave of slop, the reasons are always the same: some random moron wants his 15 minutes of fame and vibe slops something, let it be a landing page, a piece of software, a drawing, music, firmware, a book, whatever.
Creative / intelligent / motivated individuals instead use the instrument creatively (whatever that means in that person's field) because it's so easy to not make slop if you care just a tiny bit about the output the slop machine is producing.
Still, seeing the slop being churned out for fame still hurt me (i'm a software developer, hardware designer, used to be a musician and back then i had a couple of good ideas but i missed the eurorack train), but i am doing my best not to be an hypocrite about it
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.
All the FM-1 custom firmwares sound like shit, and it's not because the hardware isn't capable. (It's because Claude doesn't have ears and is the shittiest musician in the world.)
Can be, don’t have a FM-1 - but I had to tweak it until i enjoyed the result. It did measure the filters via spectrograms and could explain my points, but I’m not sure if it would have been able without my help (I used Opus 5.5). You can listen to a patch with the curtis filter, noise and unstable oscs i made here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kG1jWOXU6-N7aGWstWGiOY-fP5k...
The stock synth can’t do that. But making a svf and oscillators isn’t something musical or groundbreaking, integrating it in an assembly blob is, somehow.
I paid 20€ for improving my synth and confirming my existential crisis as a developer. …but, truth is: I spent quality time with my daughter while claude worked and thats a good thing.
You can give claude ears. It can see.
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.
This is also already ported to the FM-1: https://dmajka.github.io/elixir/
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.
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.
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.
Arturia’s MicroFreak has some open source engines and it’s an amazing piece of hardware.
I understand why someone can love Zynthian but it has little appeal to me…I’d rather have an MPC (they also run Linux) because of all the decades of design experience they embody and the volume of wisdom that I can access regarding them.
But that’s me, not you or anyone else.
Zynthian is a Swiss-army knife of audio tools .. it is a pretty great synth host, but its also an amazing effects processor, audio/midi router, USB hub for other synths, mini-DAW - every usb audio class device you plug into it can be perpetually recorded, and so on. I’m not sure its in the same class as the MPC as an instrument, but it is definitely in its own class as a studio tool.
MPC’s support 32x32 over a class compliant interface (but only at 44.1).
They have effects, plugins, sampling, recording, etc.
Plus a pretty sophisticated DAW, robust hardware, and a lot of different flavors depending on what you want… And the ecosystem includes desktop tools.
The Xynthan looks like a playground for developers…and that’s cool. But I don’t want to deal with that.
No doubt the MPC is a powerful machine - the comparison isn’t quite apt in that sense.
When there’s an open source ecosystem for MPC like the one for Zynthian, it’ll be an interesting time indeed …
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.
I’d send you a t-shirt.
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.
I have 3 M8s (2 v1, 1 v2) but they are not with me 100% of the time so the iOS version has been an absolute blessing. Tim is a coding powerhouse.
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!
It looks like we are in the knee of the curve for open source firmware for music gear.
Look closer at the 0700-AAM repo:
No commits for 2+ weeks
Few parts of it build as-is. Missing parts.
Readmes are out of date.
Maintainers not reviewing/taking PRs.
I'm on the discord and questions about building this are going unanswered.
Future remains open, but def not a serious committment yet.
This is the parent company of Behringer getting in front of firmware recomps. The hardware isn't out yet and this repo https://github.com/KickEm-Tools/0700-AAM looks like the front running fork.
We aren't talking about the same thing.
I am talking about trends and movements, you are talking about the details of a specific repo.
Look at everything springing up around the fm1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENkYmfIx9o
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.
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?
Why would they opensource a commercial DAW? To have people review the source code for security issues? ;P If you want to extend Ableton you can already do so with Max/MSP. Or write a VST plugin for it. I don't see any reason for the big DAW companies to start opensourcing their proprietary software. I mean, the prices are also not that high, a few hundred buck tops, it's nowhere into "AutoCAD" or other enterprise software territory.
> Why would they opensource a commercial DAW?
Why would anyone ever open source anything? Well, I don't know, it happens :) Parent raised the point, maybe ask them :)
> If you want to extend Ableton you can already do so with Max/MSP. Or write a VST plugin for it.
That's a really tight and constrained definition of what "extending" applications means. VSTs/Max is more like plugins/addons, then actually extending what Ableton can do, but I'm sure if you even know what Max is, you're well aware of this already. Today it isn't really possible to "extend" Ableton in any officially sanctioned way.
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.
By your own logic, I didn't call you arrogant. If you say you didn't tell them what to use, then what I say doesn't apply to you. If you're offended by what I said, maybe you actually did mean to tell them what they should or shouldn't use.
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.
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
"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
Wasn't the software side of Polyend always the worst part? Good on them for doing this
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(!))
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.