Renoise Tools On Demand

General Discussion
1

I wonder if there are any other Renoise users out there who would be willing to join together in a group effort to financially support the hiring of professional coder(s) in order to develop custom 3rd party tools for Renoise.

My key questions at this stage are:

1. Would you be interested in supporting such an effort? (This is the most important question!)

2. Do you know of any skilled, but not too expensive programmers, that we may negotiate with?

3. How much money would you realistically estimate to contribute, as an individual, in total (in USD or Euro)?

4. What specific plug-in(s) do you demand most? (Give a description, with examples and specifications if necessary.)

In general, I think it would be nice if we could objectively “quantify” our demands for features and such in terms of $$$. It would be interesting to see some sort of charter and thereby know what the highest and lowest demands among Renoise users actually are today in 2008. We can see a lot of +1 and such in the Ideas & Suggestion forum, but it would be much more interesting to see a top-100 list or something similar.

3589 users have registered on the board. Let’s face it, if you’re a working adult, spending $100+ on this kind of projects is what most of us in industrialized Western countries spend a weekend on drinks, food, movies, whatever. With just 50 more people thinking like me, that is a $5000 budget.

Let’s discuss this idea!

What do you think of it? How should it best be organized? Would we first identify the demands, make a list out of it, and then put price-tags on each one – open for all programmers to see and negotiate on?

2

I think this is a very difficult thing to quantify.

In real life, employed programmers make a decent hourly wage.

Say you were able to gather $1000 together, that pays for less than 5 days of “western” development time and you can’t get much done in that time unless you already have some framework to build on.

You might be able to get more time out of “third-world” developers, but in such a case you probably need to be a competent manager, or hire one, and this costs even more money than a programmer.

In contrast, most programmers doing hobby stuff put money very low on the list of priorities.

Furthermore, most freelance programmers have a bigger picture in mind (they hate 9 to 5, they believe in their software beyond simple user demand, they believe in open source, etc) and wouldn’t really want to work for someone telling them what to do.

That being said, there are several sites which bost programmers for hire. One of them is the Sourceforge Marketplace. Sourceforge Marketplace is cool because you can commission Open Source code that others can build upon.

http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php

However, getting people to do what you want for money without having experience in software management will probably be a nightmare on both ends of the bargain. No coder wants to work for other people unless the money is very, very good.

3

Addendum:

Let’s quantify the XRNS-PHP project, in terms of cash.

A good freelance developer makes $50 an hour and that’s a cheap wage. Let’s undercut that, bring it down to $30 an hour and pretend we don’t have any overhead to deal with (electricity, computer costs, office space, etc)

The first script developpped was the merge script, by me. My interest in the thread starts on May 27 2007 and something stable was available June 28th, 2007.

So, 30 days. Now let’s say I spent 2 hours a day on that script (i spent way more time than that when you factor in r&d, feedback, user/dev support, making a webpage, providing a download, setting up the sf project, etc). Right there, that’s $1800 worth of code.

Now, we have Beatslaughter who built a GUI, Bantai who built the midi script based on my prototype (which was completely scrapped and rebuilt from zero, so any hours I put in which should be paid for were erased) Several other users, including myself again, made more scripts, etc. It’s safe to say that the project is worth hundreds of hours of development time.

For a really bad estimate, let’s say 5 users put in 2 hours a day for 30 days (this is way off, i would multiply this by 10), that’s $9000 of development time.

Thus, your $5000 budget would be able to afford half of a really really bad estimate of the XRNS-PHP, which currently exists for $0.

4

internal FX SDK…

5

There is so many stuff that exists for $0.
What actually matters in these concepts is what we want to achieve as artists rather than what we want to make out of it.
As soon as money is involved things usually can go downhill and the true spirit may disappear.

Tools can help to make some better effort. Trading back results like free music is for me personally something that is enough.

Just keep posting good stuff and all will be fine and dandy.

6

I see what you mean, Conner_Bw, but what do you think of my idea of trying to get a clear overview/representation of all features, suggestions, etc that have been made so far (and not yet implemented or developed further)? What I mean is a “top-100” list or something (with a hierarchy of points/votes).

Well, I understand that since I’m a free-lance consultant myself (but I’m not a programmer). I don’t like for someone telling me what to do, so that’s not what I plan to impose on others either. What I had in mind was more of “hello, Renoisers, I see that you demand this particular script. I think I can do that for you on these terms and conditions”.

I’ll check it out, thanks.

All right, I guess your main point here is that we should instead help fostering a open-source culture, trying to code our own scripts and applications in the benevolent manner that have been done so far. I have nothing against that, I like that spirit and helpful attitude. We can never have enough of it.

Even so, your example is actually very interesting – because a lot of people constantly demand new stuff and very few, especially younger people who are still in school or whatever, don’t seem to understand how to quantify time and resources properly. So even if we trash the idea of opening our wallets (either because nobody would meet that demand, we couldn’t afford it, or because of ethical premises), I still think it may be a good idea to compile a list of key features and categorize them. We don’t have to quantify features in terms of money – maybe it’s better to quantify it in terms of time.

7

I think this a very good idea.

To be clear, I’m not against paying for stuff, I just think it’s a rude awakening for anyone who tries.