Thanks for the question and for spreading the word about MIDI Designer Pro 2 and asking about MD77: Voice Editor for Yamaha SY77/TG77 by Ibo Kai.

The MD77 layout -- found here -- is not for sale. It was provided for free by the masterful Ibo Kai (rated layouts by Ibo Kai). It's a Platinum layout -- so there are only 8 other Platinum Layouts at this time -- but in many senses it's like every other Community Layout. It comes from Ibo Kai's desire to produce something useful for himself and other musicians. Like other layouts, it was provided free of charge and it's free to use. The only thing you pay for is the platform (MIDI Designer Pro 2).

When the first layouts were gifted to the Community -- by Rainer and fdesnoyers -- I quickly realized that no amount of money (nor cheesy prizes) could incentivize users to make layouts as good as the ones the Open Source model was providing. There's a whole book about this called Drive (tl;dr), but basically:, in a lot of cases, people do amazing art because they want to. Plus, and more essentially, there was no money in the project to actually pay for layouts. MIDI Designer is a self-funded startup with one full-time, starving employee (me) and some part-time paid and unpaid contributors.

A few examples of layouts are below, and you can see all the Community layouts here (well, not all, but the ones that we have rated as Bronze or above).

Then how, you might ask, can we charge for MD77? MD77 is part of a bundle purchase leading up to the eventual purchase of MIDI Designer Pro 2. It allows users who don't want or need the full functionality of MDP2 yet to use this amazing layout and get a taste. Users are paying into a purchase of the platform, MDP2.

All proceeds go towards ramen noodles and coffee which power our full-time dev team and our part-time Web team. If you take a look at the Change Log, you'll see that while our users are kicking ass on their side, we're pushing the platform forward quickly.

We might provide this functionality in the future, in the same way as Apple opened the App Store in 2008. This will require a lot of work on our side (Web and in-app). The market would also have to mature (i.e., more active users) for this to be worthwhile. However, I'm quick to note that, like Wikipedia, the Open Source Model has dragged the platform this far... is it really a good idea to mess with that?

Thanks!

Dan

Dan Rosenstark, Author & CEO

MIDI Designer :: dream | create | play

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