Ideas-Thoughts about riban modular

I can see the ‘beauty’ of just doing the modules and ‘brain’ - but somehow, what keeps popping up in my mind and conversations about riban modular is the idea that these ‘modules’ would make excellent ‘controllers’ for Zynthian as well - both the existing V5, and the proposed Eurorack version. I do realize that the supporting software would have to be added to Zynthian.

There were a few people at Synthfest UK 2023 that suggested it be capable of being a generic (or specific) controller for other devices, e.g. VCV Rack. There are already generic controllers that allow labelling of controls that can do this. riban modular has specific panels dedicated to controlling specific modules with a one-to-one correlation of controls and indicators. The hardware and software will all be open so anyone could adapt it to such a purpose but I don’t (currently) plan to do so. Of course if there is desire for dedicated panels to control specific modules within Zynthian then this could be done and the new device control layer in Zynthian may help.

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It seems an eminent candidate for reference zynthian https://discourse.zynthian.org/t/new-control-device-manager-controller-device-drivers/8593/44 instance.

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Here’s an interesting reference to the idea of doing modular without patch cords:
“I suppose it should eventually end up in a museum, because it was really the first modern patch synthesiser. It works beautifully, it never goes wrong. I have had it heavily modified so it can run off a computer and now patch leads don’t have to be used any more.” that is Hans Zimmer, talking about his Moog Modular:


In this article:

I wonder what he meant and what modifications were made. It seems almost inconceivable that all those modules with all those jacks were modified for computer control!