Around about three years after a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the quirky CHOMPI handheld synth is officially discontinued. Once any remaining stock is sold, it’s gone — remaining in the hands of the users who backed, bought and love it.
Devs at Chase Bliss put out the video yesterday explaining how things will pan out from here. Biggest news is that it’s going open source, which means devs can start doing new things with CHOMPI.
Open Source
All the hardware files will be released, and additionally the tape and tempo firmwares, plus a bonus “CHOMPI Wave” firmware — a wavetable synth (not sampler) which is also designed to be a simpler route in to developing your own firmware for the device.
A Discord channel (Blisscord) will be added, files will be available on the CHOMPI website as well as GitHub.
The company will continue to offer support for the device, but won’t officially offer it for open source projects — that said, staff members are keen to remain involved in how CHOMPI evolves going forward.
The Wave firmware (which is still currently at beta) is not going to be developed in house, because it’s intended primarily as a springboard to people designing their own firmware.
Understandably, CHOMPI is still protective of the name and look, and have stated that the artwork files won’t be available, and new user created firmware mustn’t say it’s a CHOMPI.
NIBBI free plugin
Temecula DSP has released a free VST3/AU/AAX plugin called NIBBI — nice name derivative — which is intended to be a software recreation of the CHOMPI hardware.
As expected, they can’t refer to it as the CHOMPI, however the look and features make it pretty obvious.
