Korg volca sample SDK – a sample and sequence encoding library

Yeah preach! This is so awesome!

Korg have literally always been amazing about stuff like this. They were the first in the App Store on iOS, with an iPad app on day 1 for the iPad's release. Their MIDI implementations are always more consistent, more solid, and more reliable than competitors.

If you're surprised by this, you might know music manufacturers in general, but you don't know Korg. :-)

This is cool and reminds me that when I bother to think about it I'm continually surprised no major camera maker has released a camera with an open source firmware.

Granted, I don't think end-users care about the openness of their cameras, but it only takes a small core of developers who do care to donate a lot of time and vastly increase the value of your device. As an example, if you hang out on forums for Canon cameras you will find a lot of people who factor whether Magic Lantern (and open source hack on top of closed source Canon firmware) will run on the new model or not.

I particularly wish Sony (who is killing it with their sensor designs lately) would jump on this.

Not inconceivable the two are connected somehow, of course (either in tribute from Korg or even the other way round; AFX has released a bunch of tracks named after gear, e.g. Fenixfunk 5... and it'd hardly be surprising if certain artists had access to pre-launch gear.)