Starting in December, we’ll be making a few changes to our product lines to make things simpler and easier to parse. In this post, we’ll go over the exact changes so you can plan accordingly (and pick up any soon-to-be-discontinued items in our Black Friday sale, if you’d like!).

The Platform Story

We currently produce three platform modules: the Alia family of oscillators, the Versio series of effects and processors, and the Legio lineup of compact oscillators and effects. With a simple USB connection and our firmware web app, each platform has a wide variety of firmwares that can be loaded onto them – for example, an Alia can be a Basimilus drum voice, Manis industrial voice, Ataraxic oscillator, and so on – making them very flexible.

Up until this point, we’ve produced paneled versions of each module as well, with individual art for each different firmware. This has, in all honesty, made our product line gigantic and somewhat difficult to decipher. While it’s nice to be able to grab the exact panel that you want, it also makes it hard to look through a half dozen similar modules and figure out which one you want… when in reality, they all work the same, in a sense. So, we’ve decided to make some changes. It’s also hard for our wonderful retailers who have to make guesses about which variant of the same product to stock. And finally, maintaining this many different SKUs means we have a lot of capital tied up in inventory. 

Paring down

We’ll only be producing paneled modules of the most popular firmwares for each platform, and only in black (read more about the discontinuation of silver panels here). The modules that will be produced as paneled modules are:

• Versio: Desmodus Versio, Electus Versio, and Ruina Versio

• Legio: Librae Legio

• Alia: Basimilus Iteritas Alia, Incus Iteritas Alia, and Manis Iteritas Alia

Have no fear, overlays are (still) here

To make it easy to swap between firmwares at will without losing track of what parameters do what, we’ve produced packs of overlays that drop onto the module and rename their parameters. Black overlay packs for each platform will still be available, and include overlays for all firmwares. We discontinued the white/silver overlays a while back, but have a lot of stock of some of them and those are now discounted by 50% per panel. Unfortunately, multipacks are not available in white.

Goodbye to replacement panels

In the past, we have offered replacement panels in silver and black. We have reasonable stock of some panels, but we are no longer able to make aluminum replacement panels in either color. The reasons are manifold but boil down to the number of panels we have to purchase at once (a non-trivial number!). 

Grab ‘em while you can

If there’s a particular paneled module you’ve had your eye on (like Ataraxic Iteritas Alia, Melotus Versio, Virt Iter Legio…), now’s the time to order. We still have limited stock of  most platform modules in both black and silver, so it’s the perfect time to order (especially with our Black Friday sale ramping up!). While replacement panels will not be included in the upcoming Black Friday Sale, it may still be a good time to stock up on any you’ve been wanting before they disappear. We’re working hard to keep the inventory fully correct on the website, so if the panel isn’t there, we no longer have them.

Limited edition modules

This isn’t the end of new platform art, though. When a standout new firmware for one of our platforms  is released, we will produce roughly 100 (or fewer) paneled modules for that firmware at launch. We’ll announce far and wide when limited runs are happening, so you’ll have a one-time opportunity to order yours. Keep an eye on all Noise Engineering channels later this year for the first limited run.