An Update Of Sorts...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
[insert usual apology for not entertaining you like the trained monkey I am] but [insert usual litany of excuses]. We’ve been [hard at work doing stuff] but have [run in to the usual pile of bullshit that is the AU kit] and it has [taken the usual more time than we thought].
In all seriousness, we’ve decided, in the interests of not going out and kidnapping the first Apple employees we find and forcing them to mine salt for a couple years, that we will forgo releasing anything in 64-bit on the Apple side of things for a little while. Shit is in some serious drama up in that bitch right now, with the massive bloated pile of failsauce that is Logic Audio leading the way, so we’re gonna just let sleeping dogs lie for as long as we can. Hopefully Apple will decide it’s going to put all of its audio resources in to GarageBandPro and deprecate Logic entirely, thus handily solving the problem.
This shouldn’t keep us from releasing a 64-bit Win VST, but we’re going to release our normal package first, and then do that.
I feel a rant coming on.
10 comments
Hi Chris,
Not wishing to take you over the edge here but...is a 32 bit AU on the menu? I haven't booted 64 bit Logic since the whole "bridge" enfailment scenario and can't wait try out the goods. Rant Ahoy!€!
All Teh Best,
Simon.
Of course. Our normal deployment consists of Win VST, OSX VST, and OSX AU, and that won't change. We are using a bit of a different method to make the AU this time, but it shouldn't be noticeable to you.
-CR
Goodo, let me know if you need something running up the Logic flagpole.
If by something you mean "the skull of the dude that invented AU" or even better yet "the corpse of the guy that decided to sell emagic to Apple" then you're my first call.
-CR
Arr, shiver me timbers etc
*If by something you mean "the skull of the dude that invented AU"*
lols.
I think Keelhauling would give you more satisfaction Chris...
Hugo
No. I definitely want to drink Newcastle Brown Ale out of that dude's skull.
-CR
C'mon, rant for us, monkey boy! It pleases we!
In all seriousness, I remember doing several searches on Audio Unit issues when I was first working on porting my VST code, and an earlier rant of yours on Create Digital Music always came up in the first few hits on Google:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2005/11/08/apple-brags-about-au-plugins-build-one-in-5-steps/
So, your edurantment ends up having a long life out there on the superinformation autobahn.
Of course I've never bothered looking at the AU plugin spec, or Logic Audio, or bothered with any music production other than using Audacity to normalize and top & tail a few files off my Zoom H4, but...
You can read the original VST plugin spec in about 20 minutes, and if you had a pile of DSP you wanted on a platform, you could do it pretty quickly -- it's not rocket science. You want chunks of audio from the comes-into and you want to push chunks of audio into the goes-outta, you want parameters you can poll when it's time to do your processing.
Not to minimize the efforts of plugin writers, at all. The sweat goes into getting the DSP and UI right and verifying that everything works on a wide variety of hosts.
But I don't understand how Apple (or indeed Steinberg) could come up with a spec and an API that's able to defeat propeller-beanie types like you and Adam. Why complexify something that, at its root, should be simple and straightforward? It can't be that they're stupid. Is it hubris, is it sadism?
In my software world we have things like the DICOM spec for image data files. If you ever want to give yourself a headache, crack the spec for that.
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