AU Developer Throws In the Towel

[uraniumwilly]

Steven Massey creates very inexpensive and nice sounding plug-ins. As it turns out he's run into what seems to be an unfortunate bit of trouble dealing with Apple as he tried to port over his plug-ins from Pro Tools to Logic. Has anyone else heard of similar AU developer problems? I find this puzzling.

 

From Gearslutz:

 

Sorry for the bad news y'all. This was not an easy decision to make -- in fact it wasn't even really a decision. I should probably answer the question of "Why?" with something polite and diffusive. But, after what appears to be 3+ months of wasted development and having to layoff my first and only employee, I'm not feeling very polite. The real answer is "Apple Sucks." Their level of support for the AudioUnits format is depressingly insufficient.

 

Here's how things started out about a year ago, prior to beginning development. I tried to obtain information from Apple representatives at trade shows concerning the existence of a developer program for Logic, hoping they might also provide a discounted or free copy of v7. I spoke to no less than 8 to 10 people at an AES and a NAMM show. No one had a clue or any obvious desire to assist me. Finally, one individual did take my contact information and said he would follow up after the show. I never heard back. Eventually, another AU developer informed me about a secret -- in true Apple fashion -- email address which puts you in touch with someone that might handle Logic and AU issues. After a couple of initial emails, I thought I was making some in-roads. However, I never received any final information. And, my subsequent follow-up emails were either ignored or filtered.

 

Now, after three months of work and three months of perplexing, random crashes with our beta plugins, we returned to investigate the sample plug-in that Apple provides in the developer kit -- the plug-in code we patterned ours after -- the plug-in code Apple provides to developers as a starting point for creating new plug-ins.

 

Well... come to find out, this sample plug-in crashes in exactly the same manner! The core developer kit is ridiculously and embarrassingly broken. The problem is, Apple isn't embarrassed -- when this information was presented to them, the response was verging on indifference.

 

Perhaps, they will eventually get around to resolving the problem and perhaps with another thousand hours of debugging, I could finally uncover and fix the bug myself -- though my confidence that this is a Logic bug is growing stronger.

 

But more importantly, Apple does not inspire any confidence in me that building a business based on their platform would be a prudent decision for me, or you, in the long-term.

 

All these experiences (or non-experiences, rather) really beg the question, can I function at the mercy and whim of a company that

(A) doesn't seem to have any sort of dedicated support team or formalized support program,

(B) has a secret support email address,

© provides an obviously defective development kit,

(D) doesn't provide free, discounted, pre-release, or debugging versions of the software to bona-fide developers,

(E) doesn't respond to personal inquiries,

and (F) doesn't care when you do manage to get in touch?

 

Perhaps all these things would be fine in a do-it-yourself, unlimited-free-time, programming-for-the-fun-of-it scenario, but they are wholly inadequate for supporting a real company with around-the-clock customer support, which needs to resolve bugs for professional users in a timely manner.

 

Steven Massey

[Larry Mal]

BFD has been complaining about Apple and their practices for some time now.

[Dubnick]

Yeah - I actually posted something here about both earlier. Here's a link to both a re-posting of the fxpansion coder venting with another fxpansion rep acknowledging the complaints are from an fx employee:

 

Fxpansion coder on Logic/AU:

http://www.fxpansion.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=28017&highlight=logic#28017

 

Unfortunately some of the complaints of both Massey and the Fx guy (other fx employees have complained to a lesser degree before, but this guy really seems to have had it) seem to echo eachother. I love mixing in Logic, and thankfully, aside from BFD 2, most of my crucial plugs are working fine in Logic 8.01/10.4.9, but this and some other recent issues make me concerned about Apple's level of commitment to Logic and audio users in general.

[Waterboy]

Yeah. I read about this yesterday (that Massey was closing R&D on AU). Didn't get to see this letter, though.

 

That's sad. His plugins are really good. I have used them in the past with Pro Tools, and they always played nice together.

 

Bad business. A business I know little (if anything) about. But ... it's just bad business.

 

[OddTime]

If he was serious about developing on the Mac platform shouldn't he have had an ADC Select Membership? Did he? It doesn't sound like it. If he did, he wouldn't have been bugging the people at AES or NAMM. They wouldn't know diddly about AU development. Why should they? Sounds like he didn't do the proper research about developing on the Mac platform (just from reading the above quote). Why have so many other AU plug-in developers managed just fine?

[FlowerPower]

a company that

(A) doesn't seem to have any sort of dedicated support team or formalized support program,

(B) has a secret support email address,

© provides an obviously defective development kit,

(D) doesn't provide free, discounted, pre-release, or debugging versions of the software to bona-fide developers,

(E) doesn't respond to personal inquiries,

and (F) doesn't care when you do manage to get in touch?

 

If this is the rule, and not the exception, how does Waves, Native Instruments and all the other plugin developers manage to produce all their AU plugins?

[Rolo Tomasi]

But more importantly, Apple does not inspire any confidence in me that building a business based on their platform would be a prudent decision for me, or you, in the long-term.

 

The guy's obviously miffed and firmly seated on his pity pot now that he's had some doors slammed in his face. Understandable. But in his line of work especially, he should have known going in that Apple's not in the business of accomodating third party developers, least of all by divulging proprietary code to the (potential) competition. For him to assume he could build a business around it seems a poor business decision in and of itself.

 

And for what it's worth I doubt I'll ever buy a third party AU plug-in while wondering if the developer made a prudent decision in manufacturing it.

[Dubnick]

If he was serious about developing on the Mac platform shouldn't he have had an ADC Select Membership? Did he? It doesn't sound like it. If he did, he wouldn't have been bugging the people at AES or NAMM. They wouldn't know diddly about AU development. Why should they? Sounds like he didn't do the proper research about developing on the Mac platform (just from reading the above quote). Why have so many other AU plug-in developers managed just fine?

I could be wrong about this, but I believe Fxpansion are ADC members and while the link above may not mention it, when Logic 8 came out I believe a couple of the main Fxpansion guys vented about the fact that the ADC membership didn't do them any good anyhow.

[Dubnick]

As someone who uses Logic 8 everyday but is not a knee-jerk Logic/Apple defender, it seems a bit self-defeating for Logic users to immediately place all blame on the developer complaining, especially when there is some consistency in the complaints. If you love a piece of software, especially a piece of software that may not be priority number one for it's parent company, I would think that you would want to take such things into serious consideration and maybe voice concern to said parent company. I understand Apple's "corporate culture" and that part of that culture is a strict protection of intellectual property, but if they choose to get into the DAW business, they're going to have to take into consideration the nature of that business, which is that the end user is going to use third-party plugs and demand stability with them. If end users see consistent issues with third party plugs in Logic, but look at thier collegues on other DAW having no such issues, where is the blame going to be placed by the user? One of the things I found most worrying about the fxpansion letter was the complaint that even within Apple, the Logic dept. is treated as almost an outside entity and that, while one would expect that there would be tight integration and synchronicity between Logic and CoreAudio, that often times one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing (this was particularly worrying to me because it would seem to explain a lot about how stuff like the continual AppleFWAudio driver issue or the Agere firewire chipset switch would be allowed to happen, in spite of the fact that both would reflect very poorly on Logic to the end user). Anyhow, i just wanted to throw that out there.

[DaniGordon]

Steven Massey creates very inexpensive and nice sounding plug-ins. As it turns out he's run into what seems to be an unfortunate bit of trouble dealing with Apple as he tried to port over his plug-ins from Pro Tools to Logic. Has anyone else heard of similar AU developer problems? I find this puzzling.

 

From Gearslutz:

 

Sorry for the bad news y'all. This was not an easy decision to make -- in fact it wasn't even really a decision. I should probably answer the question of "Why?" with something polite and diffusive. But, after what appears to be 3+ months of wasted development and having to layoff my first and only employee, I'm not feeling very polite. The real answer is "Apple Sucks." Their level of support for the AudioUnits format is depressingly insufficient.

 

Here's how things started out about a year ago, prior to beginning development. I tried to obtain information from Apple representatives at trade shows concerning the existence of a developer program for Logic, hoping they might also provide a discounted or free copy of v7. I spoke to no less than 8 to 10 people at an AES and a NAMM show. No one had a clue or any obvious desire to assist me. Finally, one individual did take my contact information and said he would follow up after the show. I never heard back. Eventually, another AU developer informed me about a secret -- in true Apple fashion -- email address which puts you in touch with someone that might handle Logic and AU issues. After a couple of initial emails, I thought I was making some in-roads. However, I never received any final information. And, my subsequent follow-up emails were either ignored or filtered.

 

Now, after three months of work and three months of perplexing, random crashes with our beta plugins, we returned to investigate the sample plug-in that Apple provides in the developer kit -- the plug-in code we patterned ours after -- the plug-in code Apple provides to developers as a starting point for creating new plug-ins.

 

Well... come to find out, this sample plug-in crashes in exactly the same manner! The core developer kit is ridiculously and embarrassingly broken. The problem is, Apple isn't embarrassed -- when this information was presented to them, the response was verging on indifference.

 

Perhaps, they will eventually get around to resolving the problem and perhaps with another thousand hours of debugging, I could finally uncover and fix the bug myself -- though my confidence that this is a Logic bug is growing stronger.

 

But more importantly, Apple does not inspire any confidence in me that building a business based on their platform would be a prudent decision for me, or you, in the long-term.

 

All these experiences (or non-experiences, rather) really beg the question, can I function at the mercy and whim of a company that

(A) doesn't seem to have any sort of dedicated support team or formalized support program,

(B) has a secret support email address,

© provides an obviously defective development kit,

(D) doesn't provide free, discounted, pre-release, or debugging versions of the software to bona-fide developers,

(E) doesn't respond to personal inquiries,

and (F) doesn't care when you do manage to get in touch?

 

Perhaps all these things would be fine in a do-it-yourself, unlimited-free-time, programming-for-the-fun-of-it scenario, but they are wholly inadequate for supporting a real company with around-the-clock customer support, which needs to resolve bugs for professional users in a timely manner.

 

Steven Massey

 

Oh Oh!

 

Bad news.

[midiatim]

As an Apple-owner for 17 years -- my perception is that Apple 1) is very into proprietary solutions; 2) doesn't care much for NIH (not invented here) stuff. If they really like something, they may buy and assimilate it. Sometimes it seems they deliberately obsolete popular, NIH products (Kaleidoscope) with each System release.

 

To an extent I can understand that -- people bug them about support; and I don't doubt that Apple programs are unfairly blamed for badly-programmed extensions. (Hence AU-scanning).

 

If Apple decides it doesn't like serial ports? BANG, gone. Too bad for all the people who paid hard-earned money for serial gear. Oh well. It might cost $5 to put a serial port in a computer, but ... tough bounce.

 

If Apple decides it doesn't like supporting its own products, it'll abandon BIG, BIG user communities (e.g. Hypercard). By comparison, one non-corporate developer is peanuts.

 

Too bad. When the small, furry mammals become dinosaurs, it's time for new companies to evolve.

 

how does Waves, Native Instruments and all the other plugin developers manage to produce all their AU plugins?

Celebrities will gladly shag other celebrities.

[uraniumwilly]

As it turns out, all is not completely lost:

 

I've deleted my original message... I also had a good chat today with the product manager for Logic. He seems genuinely concerned and wants to figure out why I had such difficulty connecting with Apple.

 

Steve Massey

Massey Plugins Inc.

 

I hope his issues and problems get solved quickly. Very glad to see a Logic rep respond.