"Logic Pro X will eventually be sandboxed"

[BDeep]

There's some AU thingy in iOS. But hey, we will see.

[Crandall1]

The letter we received was entirely in relation to AudioUnit plug-ins in OS X, and how Logic deals with them. iOS was not mentioned. Several other devs received this letter, but I know of many that didn't. (For instance, I didn't directly; someone else in my company did.)

What I tweeted was a direct quote from the letter, other than cutting out the bit about Garageband. The actual, entire first paragraph is:

"I'm writing to inform you that the Logic team has posted Logic Pro X Developer Preview 1 build 2911.47. This special developer preview has the same functionality as version 10.0.2 and is being provided for your testing and continued development. At some point in the future Logic Pro X and GarageBand will be sandboxed, which means that all Audio Unit plugins and audio hardware will need to be sandbox-safe."

It is historically typical for Apple to send these sorts of letters about something "at some time in the future" approximately one year before the change occurs. Following that line of logic (pun intended) you can expect to see fully sandboxed versions of Logic and GarageBand at some point late next year.

I have the developer preview downloaded; I haven't installed it yet. I'll check all our products, as I usually do when there's a new Logic seed, and inform our customers of the status.

[dayjob]

so we have a year to get our shit together and update to anew computer (if necessary) and all those kinds of things if we don't want to deal w/apple sandboxing and logic etc etc..

i'm sure as more details come to pass and the day approaches that we'll hear many opinions and rants from various developers.

i'm very curious to see what happens and if a lot of small developers say goodbye to AU as a format.

logic is the ONLY host that is AU only correct?

i suspect a AU to VST wrapper sandbox work around or similar will show up.. maybe bidule will do the trick but i can't see putting bidule on every track i would us an AU... so let's hope the last pre-sandboxed version of logic is stable.

thanks for chiming in CR.

[Crandall1]

The only other AU-only host I'm aware of is Numerology. There might be some off-brand shit floating about, of course.

[Compyfox]

Logic users will not be pleased to suddenly loose a load of their tools yet again.


So which host is currently pulling the most crap?
AVID ProTools?
Apple Logic?
Steinberg Cubase?

You decide!

[Crandall1]

I just installed the Dev Preview and did a scan. No Native Instruments products passed. Some of ours did, but not all. FXpansion's did, fwiw. As did iZotope's. I haven't the faintest idea why. I'm sure finding out will be hours of fun.

[dayjob]

at least we have a years worth of hilarious complaining to do.

someone post this over at gearslutz.. i was banned form there for being too awesome.

[djanthonyw]

Could someone please enlighten me, what does Sandboxed mean?

[Crandall1]

Okay. False alarm on the NI stuff. Turns out I just never installed the AU versions, because why?

Regarding the meaning of "sandboxed," it's kind of hard to describe in laymen's terms. Basically, the app lives on its own little island when it is running; it can't talk to anything else, and nothing can talk to it, without going through the kernel via approved pipelines. This is how iOS applications run, and Apple is trying to make it system-wide for OS X as well.

Nominally, this would be a problem with a DAW; a sandboxed application doesn't talk to your ~/Documents/ folder. It has its own. But they're not really doing it as a pure sandbox; rather, it is only partially sandboxed. The ostensible reason for sandboxing is twofold. First, if the app is subject to malware (say, an email app or a web browser) then the malware doesn't have any access to the rest of the system, and can only do minimal damage. Second, if the app has some crashy aspects (e.g. something like a DAW that runs plug-ins that may or may not be stable) then a crash in that app won't bring down the rest of the system. Just like if an app crashes in iOS, it doesn't cause the phone to lock up. It just goes away, as its instance is killed.

This is vastly oversimplified, but that's the general idea. For a plug-in to be "sandbox-ready," it has to be able to be instanced inside Logic's instance, without needing to talk to, say, the Internet, or some whacky system feature that Logic doesn't have access to. There is a big problem looming for non-CoreAudio audio interfaces, and I assume MIDI interfaces. But there aren't many of those.

Should be interesting, anyhow. It is, in effect, closing off all access to Logic except for stuff that has been pre-approved (through various means, including digital signing) by Apple. The general feeling among our peers is that it is the first step in making it so Logic can only see plug-ins purchased through the App Store. Personally, I don't see how this is a good thing, and we're not going to give Apple 30% of our business just for the honor of making value-added content for their DAW. Come to that, we'll remove the AU versions from our installers entirely, and basically only sell plug-ins for Live and Studio One.

[aMUSEd]

The ostensible reason for sandboxing is twofold. First, if the app is subject to malware (say, an email app or a web browser) then the malware doesn't have any access to the rest of the system, and can only do minimal damage. Second, if the app has some crashy aspects (e.g. something like a DAW that runs plug-ins that may or may not be stable) then a crash in that app won't bring down the rest of the system. Just like if an app crashes in iOS, it doesn't cause the phone to lock up. It just goes away, as its instance is killed.

The first reason seems spurious. I don't know of any legit plugins that have functioned as malware (except for a few with dodgy installers like those toolbar-ware ones that were going round but it was the installer that was malware, not the plugin). The second reason is plausible but it's possible for apps to do that already without making unnecessary demands on plugin developers to change their plugins. Reaper has had that sort of sandboxing for years and doesn't ask devs to create "sandbox ready" plugins. So it seems this is possibly more about Apple wanting to control what goes in their systems and how it is sold.

[dayjob]

aren't there some plug ins that require a brief internet handshake for registering/copy protection?

this all just seems like a glimmer of a reasonable security concern that mushroomed into a way to extend more apple control of anything that resides on an apple computer.

[parma]

As a Logic user, let me say that I will drop Logic in a hot second if Apple requires developers to release plug-ins through the App Store (and take a 30% cut).

[dayjob]

As a Logic user, let me say that I will drop Logic in a hot second if Apple requires developers to release plug-ins through the App Store (and take a 30% cut).

i'll keep using whatever the last pre-sandboxed version is until it doesn't work anymore then move on to something else.

[Crandall1]

Yes, my general feeling (and this is as someone that makes not a small amount of their yearly salary from Logic users) is that Apple is trying to create a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. At least, when assuming the normal reasons for sandboxing.

If you look at the bigger picture, there is, as aMUSEd suggests, a reasonable argument to be made that Apple is just trying to extend the level of control they have over the iOS environment to OS X. There's a further tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, at least among my fellow developers, that iOS and OS X are headed for a merge. Logic is a fairly small piece of the Apple Ecosystem, at least financially, so if it is a bit caught up in the whirlwind, well, that's just collateral damage that they can probably live with.

I'll remind everybody that they had ZERO problem axing 40% of Logic's userbase when they bought emagic and killed Windows support. And then again, when they killed VST support. Apple's general methodology is "our way or the highway," with the understanding that you have little choice in the matter. Steinberg has caught this disease to a certain degree, having just axed VST2.4 support, and announced that Steinberg products will be VST3 only in the not-too-distant future.

So, we had a good run for a few years, but the plug-in world is about to get whacky again. Not having a common format means the customer loses. They lose their favorite plug-ins, from devs that can't or won't support every whim these two companies have, or they lose their favorite DAW, if it doesn't jibe with how they perceive their freedoms to be with respect to how it operates. Overall, I see this as a good time for Reaper, EnergyXT, Studio One, Live. That is to say, DAWs marketed by companies that don't hate their customers.

[Sampleconstruct]

Don't they have anything better to do in Cupertino?