Tracking Apple Silicon Native Hosts, Plugins, Effects

[Markus Krause]

Meanwhile all Tone2 Synths have been moved to M1 native and we provided free updates.
Once again Apple had been seriously breaking things. The migration was a very painful and frustrating process with lots of trial and error and many betas necessary.
In our case the migration needed 6 months of additional work. Time that could have been used to develop new products or to release new updates. This has been doing a significant financial harm to our small company.

[JonathanLevine]

Meanwhile all Tone2 Synths have been moved to M1 native and we provided free updates.
Once again Apple had been seriously breaking things. The migration was a very painful and frustrating process with lots of trial and error and many betas necessary.
In our case the migration needed 6 months of additional work. Time that could have been used to develop new products or to release new updates. This has been doing a significant financial harm to our small company.

I mean is it really Apple who is breaking things? From what I can tell so far, every company that has taken forever to create native versions of their plug-ins have had a lot of really old, glitchy code to begin with which would obviously make it hard to make a smooth transition. Spending a bunch of time cleaning up and fixing outdated code that should have been consistently maintained from the get-go isn’t really Apple’s fault.

I mean FabFilter had native releases, not even betas available within a couple of months after the first Apple silicon machines shipped to the public. They also have quite a decent amount of plug-ins (a lot of which have some pretty advanced feature sets) and they were able to do it just fine along with a number of other plug-in developers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Apple made things perfectly seamless for everybody, but it’s not their fault it has taken so many companies like yours so long to get their stuff updated especially if my point about fixing and cleaning up outdated code the way Native Instruments had to was true.

[Markus Krause]

You're not a plugin developer and not familiar with the technical details. It's not trivial at all to port software to a new platform.

How much work it is to port to M1 depends on the libraries that are used (JUCE vs VSTSDK vs iPlug).

Unlike a couple of other companies we did not use an abstraction framework like JUCE as an adapter for our plugins (I assume FabFilter uses this). With newer versions of JUCE the port was easy because the JUCE team already had done almost all work. With JUCE the transition was easy as the developers just had to recompile stuff.

We (and many other companies too) did not use JUCE as an adapter. Instead, we natively supported VST (VSTSDK) and did use Steinberg's VSTGUI. To port to M1 we had to rewrite big parts of the GUI library and develop a completely new AudioUnit interface. Because of security restrictions of the operating system it is not possible to debug AudioUnits. This means lots of trial and error and wastes lots of development time. Then everything needs to be tested.

[wvshpr]

[nordickvr]

Don't get me wrong.
Definitely appreciate all the hard work devs are doing to maintain them sofwares compatible with so many OSs/configs/DAWs... You name it!
That said, I'm just not sure this is the thread in which this (specific) conversation belongs?

[JonathanLevine]

You're not a plugin developer and not familiar with the technical details. It's not trivial at all to port software to a new platform.

How much work it is to port to M1 depends on the libraries that are used (JUCE vs VSTSDK vs iPlug).

Unlike a couple of other companies we did not use an abstraction framework like JUCE as an adapter for our plugins (I assume FabFilter uses this). With newer versions of JUCE the port was easy because the JUCE team already had done almost all work. With JUCE the transition was easy as the developers just had to recompile stuff.

We (and many other companies too) did not use JUCE as an adapter. Instead, we natively supported VST (VSTSDK) and did use Steinberg's VSTGUI. To port to M1 we had to rewrite big parts of the GUI library and develop a completely new AudioUnit interface. Because of security restrictions of the operating system it is not possible to debug AudioUnits. This means lots of trial and error and wastes lots of development time. Then everything needs to be tested.

Alright so your company decided to use an older, sh*ttier framework to create your plug-ins but you’re still blaming Apple for the time it took you to update your stuff? That’s not Apple’s fault.

I mean if it was going to take half a year of fixing things, at that point you might as well have switched over to the JUCE framework for your plug-ins so you don’t run into these problems again with Steinberg’s stuff.

Apple gave developers access to as many resources as humanly possible so they make a quick and smooth transition to their own silicon (which was inevitably going to happen at some point anyway), so more companies like yours should have been properly prepared for it and used their resources to your advantage.

All I see in what you just said right there is a bunch of bad software development decisions from your company’s end but you’re still blaming Apple for it.

[roringtonsmithe]

Meanwhile all Tone2 Synths have been moved to M1 native and we provided free updates.
Once again Apple had been seriously breaking things. The migration was a very painful and frustrating process with lots of trial and error and many betas necessary.
In our case the migration needed 6 months of additional work. Time that could have been used to develop new products or to release new updates. This has been doing a significant financial harm to our small company.

Any chance of resurrecting bi filter? That thing whipped!

[PieBerger]

KVR keyboard warriors out in force, sheesh.

[Markus Krause]

Apple gave developers access to as many resources as humanly possible so they make a quick and smooth transition to their own silicon (which was inevitably going to happen at some point anyway), so more companies like yours should have been properly prepared for it and used their resources to your advantage.

Fact is:
- You got 46 posts.
- All your posts were done within this thread only.
- You're aggressively defending Apple
- You're using very professional marketing language

My conclusion: You seem to be a professional marketing sock-puppet

[teilo]

This has been argued to death in numerous other threads. This is the support thread for asaudio.tech. Take it elsewhere, please.

[Markus Krause]

This has been argued to death in numerous other threads. This is the support thread for asaudio.tech. Take it elsewhere, please.

I respect this. Sorry for it

[JonathanLevine]

Apple gave developers access to as many resources as humanly possible so they make a quick and smooth transition to their own silicon (which was inevitably going to happen at some point anyway), so more companies like yours should have been properly prepared for it and used their resources to your advantage.

Fact is:
- You got 46 posts.
- All your posts were done within this thread only.
- You're aggressively defending Apple
- You're using very professional marketing language

My conclusion: You seem to be a professional marketing sock-puppet

And with that right there you just lost all credibility.

You know you’ve lost an argument when you bring up a bunch of completely irrelevant points and refuse to address any of the ones I’ve made.

Sorry teilo, I’m done now but that needed to be said.

[jamcat]

Markus, all of your posts are whining about Apple or Steinberg.
My conclusion: You seem to be an amateur programmer.

[teilo]

Sorry teilo, I’m done now but that needed to be said.

No, it didn't. Reported.

And to anyone else engaging with this: Be an adult and bite your tongue.

[boojiboy]

Reported for what exactly? Your first post says this a thread for, amongst other things , discussions. Those two were just having one in my opinion. You are entitled to police your website-that this thread is now apparently just in support of- but I don’t think you have the role of moderator just because you started this thread.