"Logic Pro X will eventually be sandboxed"

[jonahs]

Will sandboxing make it so you can't use too many plugins and glitch out the system? If apple does stuff like this and makes plugins more "musical" I'm all for it. The current system is terrible for live music. I'd be glad if someone in apple's position burnt it down and started over.

Apple seemingly did good with audiobus on iOS7, and coreMIDI, NetworkMIDI and the IAC bus are all attempting at least to help musicians make music on computers. It's better than the competing alternatives. (I can still bring down my system with MIDI feedback though!) I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. AUs seem a bit half baked, considering most of them are wrapped VSTs, but I don't know if that's because of developers fighting it or not.

I hope the companies that make stuff I like and bought products from stay in business, but I'm not going to blame apple if they don't.

I like a lot of plugins, but it's in spite of all their crap, not because of it. Most plugins make waldorf look good in terms of bugs. Is anyone surprised when a plugin crashes any more? It's a like a bad joke about an abusive spouse, "Honey, you know how I get, it's your fault for not saving!".

Compound that with a major selling point of many plugins is their "workflow efficiency" you've kind of lost the plot. Why sell cheap plugins then? The people that care about workflow efficiency can pay thousands of dollars. Gee, I could spend money on an efficient workflow, that probably crashes or get a module/ korg volca to jam out on and save up for an analog mono synth? Ever wonder why most software developers use hardware if they make music!

Everything goes in cycles. I think 3rd party plugins are on a downturn regardless of what apple does. When you've bought Live Suite, Push, (or Logic, Maschine and Komplete) an audio interface and a laptop can you afford anything else? Do you really even need it? Max for Live will supply free content for years. I don't think Native Instruments cares about selling plugins because I'm sure Maschine Mk3 will be capable a host. if it isn't MK4 will be! They have the Reaktor user library to sell too.

Sonar? Haha. Gibson. So Digital Performer, Protools, Fruity, Reason? All pretty great stock plugins. Cubase, for now. Most of the obsessive plugin collectors got into eurorack.

It's like back in the bad old days some dude got rich making a program called winamp to play MP3s. Can you imagine that now? Paying for a program to play MP3s! Or think of all the high-end third party productivity software that's dead on the side of the road.

You'll still be able to sell plugins to engineers and people that mix for a living?

[Angus_FX]

Will sandboxing make it so you can't use too many plugins and glitch out the system?

Categorically not.

AAX mandatory digital signatures managed by iLok shysters PACE Anti-Piracy, reselling freely-available X.509 crypto on a $500/year subscription program.

Steinberg EOLing the perfectly serviceable (well, at least, as-good-as-MIDI) VST2 in favour of VST3 which suffers from a fundamentally flawed understanding of what plug-ins are.

Apple with sandboxes and trying to wean everybody on to the App Store (they don't have to make it compulsory - that's not how Apple works! They'll just make it really easy and soon a good % users won't remember how to pay with a credit card and download a .dmg from a web site). It's not on the App Store? Well, clearly, the developer isn't an Apple-Approved Audio Unit Developer and these AUs can't be trusted. They might crash, or give you a virus, or steal your credit card number. Trust the Great Fruit.


Sad times indeed for this industry

[Tronam]

Will sandboxing make it so you can't use too many plugins and glitch out the system?

Categorically not.

AAX mandatory digital signatures managed by iLok shysters PACE Anti-Piracy, reselling freely-available X.509 crypto on a $500/year subscription program.

Steinberg EOLing the perfectly serviceable (well, at least, as-good-as-MIDI) VST2 in favour of VST3 which suffers from a fundamentally flawed understanding of what plug-ins are.

Apple with sandboxes and trying to wean everybody on to the App Store (they don't have to make it compulsory - that's not how Apple works! They'll just make it really easy and soon a good % users won't remember how to pay with a credit card and download a .dmg from a web site). It's not on the App Store? Well, clearly, the developer isn't an Apple-Approved Audio Unit Developer and these AUs can't be trusted. They might crash, or give you a virus, or steal your credit card number. Trust the Great Fruit.


Sad times indeed for this industry

The mechanism I use to purchase my plugins doesn't really matter that much to me, but that's a very consumer centric point of view and I don't fully understand the downsides of the App Store for VST developers. The 30% cut is probably the one aspect of it that bothers me the most, but if presence in a centralized marketplace like that translates to more sales, then maybe it could be worth it? People have grown so accustomed to online stores like this now that the transition may eventually be unavoidable. The Propellerheads Rack Extension store might be the first audio-centric example of this I've seen so far and though I think the page navigation still needs some work, the general idea has its benefits.

[machinesworking]

Several attempts at other plug-in formats have come and gone since we've been in this business. They've all devolved in to a Lord Of The Flies style pissing match. Ultimately, to make a living making plug-ins, you have to have support for the DAWs people most use. These are Live, Logic, and Cubase. (And PT, if you're in to that sort of thing.) Logic and Cubase have their own formats, and will never support some third-party FOSS format. And there you have it.

Basically, any other format is stillborn. Plain and simple.

This is the sad truth of it.

Although I will say that right now with OSX and AU things are really pretty smooth for me. From an end user perspective right now is for me anyway the height of stability. The only crashes I get are with jBridge-d to 64 bit VST plug ins, not a problem and to be expected.

For those comparing notes Digital Performer 8 and Live 8 as hosts.

[mandolarian]

People have grown so accustomed to online stores like this now that the transition may eventually be unavoidable.

Ummm, no. And hell no. And never. If this is the end game, the corporatization of music creation tools with a 30% Apple/M$ tax, then I'm out.

The wonderful thing about the plugin revolution is the free-spirited innovation by independent developers sold directly to customers on an open internet. Locking that creative spirit behind a walled corporate garden is a bleaker future than I care to imagine.

[dayjob]

People have grown so accustomed to online stores like this now that the transition may eventually be unavoidable.

Ummm, no. And hell no. And never. If this is the end game, the corporatization of music creation tools with a 30% Apple/M$ tax, then I'm out.

The wonderful thing about the plugin revolution is the free-spirited innovation by independent developers sold directly to customers on an open internet. Locking that creative spirit behind a walled corporate garden is a bleaker future than I care to imagine.

linux. someday maybe.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[dayjob]

The big difference being that Rack Extensions are increasing the availability of different "plugins" while a sandboxed Logic would ostensibly decrease the availability of different plugins. Reason and Logic would arrive at the same point but with opposite trajectories if that makes sense. Developers might be more willing to let Propellerhead have their cut because Reason users are a completely new user-base that didn't previously exist before Rack Extensions. If Apple wants devs to fork over 30% just to be able to sell to the already established Logic user-base, devs are going to have to make one of these choices: 1. Swallow a 30% loss in AU sales 2. Raise prices on all standards (VST, AAX) to compensate 3. Raise prices only on AU versions to compensate 4. Drop AU entirely

1 is not going to happen. 2 is unlikely (nobody is going to want to pay extra to subsidize Logic users) 3 is unlikely (only the die-hards would stick with Logic if compatible plugins cost a third more just for the privilege of using them in Logic) . Which leaves 4 as the only viable option for many developers.

I agree that, from a consumer standpoint, being able to go to one single place to get all purchases and updates for your plugins would be nice. Maybe it would decrease piracy for "Logic approved" plugins, but people that are inclined to use pirated software will just move on to another non-sandboxed DAW. So in the end, I don't think the "reduced piracy" argument would be too persuasive to get devs on board.

just quoting this from earlier in the thread regarding REs and how it's not quite the same situation.

[patchhunter]

Re can be used on windows/Mac.

[valhallasound]

People have grown so accustomed to online stores like this now that the transition may eventually be unavoidable.

Ummm, no. And hell no. And never. If this is the end game, the corporatization of music creation tools with a 30% Apple/M$ tax, then I'm out.

The wonderful thing about the plugin revolution is the free-spirited innovation by independent developers sold directly to customers on an open internet. Locking that creative spirit behind a walled corporate garden is a bleaker future than I care to imagine.

+1000.

Going from a situation where I can sell my own plugins, at whatever price point works, through my own website, to a situation where I have to sell them through a single point of sales, where I give up 30% of the profit, and have to get everything approved by a mega company before I sell it, would be HUGELY DEPRESSING. Dealing with the whims of Apple/Steinberg/Avid/Pace is depressing enough as is.

I don't put Microsoft in that category, as their software practices haven't negatively impacted my plugin development (yet). Plus, Microsoft didn't hire me in 2009, which forced me to find my own career path, hence Valhalla DSP.

Sean Costello

[egbert]

The mechanism I use to purchase my plugins doesn't really matter that much to me, but that's a very consumer centric point of view and I don't fully understand the downsides of the App Store for VST developers. The 30% cut is probably the one aspect of it that bothers me the most, but if presence in a centralized marketplace like that translates to more sales, then maybe it could be worth it? People have grown so accustomed to online stores like this now that the transition may eventually be unavoidable. The Propellerheads Rack Extension store might be the first audio-centric example of this I've seen so far and though I think the page navigation still needs some work, the general idea has its benefits.

He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

[Angus_FX]

The approval system is worse than the tax. The 30% tax isn't *that* much worse than the dealer channel setup (the tax is less than what the channel takes, OTOH the channel isn't a vertically integrated monopoly - choice of shops, competition etc.). It's the monopolist, approvalist, forget-how-to-buy-any-other-way aspect that really grates.

You can indeed level some of the same criticisms at the RE App Store - the major distinction is that REs are written from scratch in the first place for a single, narrow, highly specialized target, and they're not intended to be a be-all and end-all. Look at we haven't ported to RE to see where that leads. There's lots of stuff you can't do with RE, but you sign up to that at the get-go.

As to the centralized marketplace. We've tried casting a wide net various ways at various times, and in most cases been severely disappointed with the outcome. The one partial exception to that is "LE" versions bundled with DAWs. I don't believe there are that many people for whom "too much hassle to buy" is the major barrier stopping them buying a load of plug-ins. It's solving a problem that doesn't, in this market, exist. It makes sense for a $2 game.. 30 minutes discovering the maker, researching them, navigating their site, setting up an account and buying is more time than most people will probably play the stupid thing. But for a $200 piece of software that you spend hours, days or weeks just learning? Also, we get data from our resellers, and while some sales are as part of multi-item purchases, it's less than you'd think (and less than it used to be - walking in to a store and splashing $2k on 5 or 10 products you haven't researched isn't so much of a thing).

Agree with Sean about M$. In their prime, in the late 90s / early 2000s, they tried to pull similar stunts to those Apple, FB etc. are up to now - mandatory digital signatures, single-sign-in, all sorts of monopolist shenanigans - but the EU & US courts held their toes to the fire bigtime & they've not really been the same since. They have no dog in the DAW fight either since the effective abandonment of DirectShow as an audio platform, and don't even seem all that serious about displacing ASIO as the pro-audio driver architecture of choice.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[softska]

You can indeed level some of the same criticisms at the RE App Store - the major distinction is that REs are written from scratch in the first place for a single, narrow, highly specialized target, and they're not intended to be a be-all and end-all. Look at we haven't ported to RE to see where that leads. There's lots of stuff you can't do with RE, but you sign up to that at the get-go.

Well, maybe, but I think many didn't sign up just to pay the product twice just to have a slightly better workflow than rewire. It makes me sad it is now somehow an accepted thing and no one push for crossgrade price for the customers anymore.

[Tronam]

He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

No Apple thread is truly complete without a reference to Orwell.