I’ve been a big fan of UDO since the start and bought 2 synths out of the line-up - and I have to say i’m very happy with them. They do offer something that other synths don’t in terms of sound, at least in my humble opinion.
At the same time they lack some basic stuff that other synths have, basically all other synths. I thought they will come in some firmware updates, but they never did, which was a bit disappointing. I’m sometimes not sure does is UDO team aware that spending some time and delivering just a few basic features bug/fixes in the firmware update saves days of time for the artists that use these synths on daily basis.
Anyway to cut right to the chase, I did gave credit to them as they said they are small team, and can’t dedicate enough time for everything. As a software developer myself I can understand that.
But since last few months, we have seen extreme updates in LLM models, and their ability to basically handle extremely difficult tasks in no time, let alone add a few features here and there to the already well maintained (and i assume documented) codebase.
In my opinion there are no more excuses for not delivering the firmware update that would fix a few bugs and add a few simple features for a synth(s) that cost north of 2k.
I went to reverse engineer the Super 6 a few nights ago, just for the sake of adding two very basic features:
finally give it a DUMP functionality, we even have the button labeled on the keyboard and never got it
implement a system where LED of Manual button would flash while you are changing fader/knob values vs to the current patch value. Meaning if a LFO1 rate is on 50% on my saved patch, but my actual fader on synth is 90%, while i move it down LED blinks rapidly when i am far away from saved patch value, and it starts slowing down while i’m moving to the saved value, and stops flashing when I hit it. Same for knobs and switches. Its a very effective way of not needing any editors or computers to work out positions of knobs/faders/switches of loaded patch.
I don’t want to advertise modded firmware or brick anyone’s synth for that matter, but I wanted to make this post, just to “motivate” the team to not forget these “older” synths in their line up.
Doing firmware updates and clearing up some bugs mentioned on the forum probably took weeks before, but now its a matter of day(s) for a dev or two, so please UDO take advantage of the current state of things and ship us FW
I would love a “catch on” feature and also being able to see the current value vs the value saved in the patch (so you could for example avoid the ‘jumps’ you hear when moving the filter). Amazing that you implemented this yourself by reverse engineering the firmware with an LLM.
I am a software engineer too and experienced the incredible advances in LLM capabilities the last year as well. Still unsure about how I feel about all of this: the speed and capabilities are amazing, but I feel that Claude robbed me of the joy I got from programming and solving engineering problems by myself.
I really hope that UDO will roll out an official firmware update soon with these feature requests.
I don’t think I am brave enough to install custom firmware. What if the bootloader gets corrupted by an error in the custom firmware, then you can’t go back to official firmware?
Also in the software engineering world, former Java developer myself, and couldn’t agree more here. In the last 6 months, capabilities have gone from, oh that’s cool, to, Will I ever write another line of code myself?! UDO, do you guys need Tokens?! Can we start a firmware go fund me for tokens for the team?! Kidding but I would love to see UDO and other manufacturers start to embrace AI for coding. It should speed things up dramatically.
Also, finally got my DMNO delivered this weekend and couldn’t be happier, Amazing Synth!
My Super6 is currently bricked so I will gladly reflash the hard drive with anything at this point! Long story short my unit has already been through a factory reflash and a year later is back to not booting up properly. Please msg me if you can provide any assistance!
At the least getting the LLM to do an in-depth code review would iron out some bugs (but if you can add a few features then all the better for keeping your customers happy).
Sorry but no Go Fund me is needed. Not even API key and expensive token usage. A simple Max subscription on Claude can deliver what we need in a matter of a week. There is no need to write a single line of code anymore, just check quality of results and iterate. Software engineering has been largely solved.
AI or not, I don’t buy the “we’re small” argument. That gets you a few months of credit, not years. Meanwhile, Tastychips has a Discord channel where they interact with users daily and push out new firmware updates bi-weekly. And they published roadmaps for their GR series. If they can do that and Groove Synthesis can spit out new FX and an editor for the 3rd Wave, there is no reason why UDO can’t at least ship bug fixes… other than they just aren’t making it their priority.
The time stamp on the last SG firmware update is May of 2025. That’s 17 months of dead air. I love my UDOs. But I can also love many other synths that get actual support.