Boz - give us an update on what's going on with the Plugins lately? How's the company doing?

Recording, Mixing and Producing
#1

Hey @bozmillar - what’s new in the Boz Digital Labs world? Working on any crazy new concepts you can share yet?

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#2

I’m in the process of doing the most boring thing in the world right now; rewriting all my plugins. I used iPlug for the longest time as my framework. But it stopped being maintained as iPlug 2 was being developed, and with all the changes that apple is always throwing around, I needed to switch to a platform that had financial incentive to keep up to date, so I’m switching to JUCE. It took me a while to get a functional plugin that had all the backend workings that I wanted it to have, but I finally got a hang of how JUCE works and I can finally say I actually like it now.

So now I’m going through and porting all my plugins to JUCE, and I’m trying to make sure I’m writing my code in a way that makes it easy to maintain and update.

There are a few plugins that I really want to finish. There’s one that is essentially a plugin to make automation easier. I got a working, but finacky prototype in iPlug. But I made an update to it that broke some basic functionality and now it doesn’t work, and every time I open the project and look at the code, it’s too much of a pain to fix. So I’ll rewrite it in JUCE once I have the time. But I really miss having that plugin. It makes me sad every time I do automation knowing that plugin no longer works.

I also want to get more into samples. I have a few things that I really want to try.

  1. Pianos. I’m trying to find a way to sample pianos that will significantly reduce the hard drive footprint (and therefore memory and load time). I had one pretty close to done, but I didn’t love the sound of the attack on the quiet notes, so I put to to the side until I’m done with these rewrites. I want to do a variety of pianos, some home pianos, some concert pianos, and everything in between. But I have to automate the system because collecting and organizing samples is a miserable experience. Ideally what I want to do is write a script that will let me push a button, walk away for a few hours, then come back to a nearly finished library. If I can get that working, then it would take the overhead out of sampling pianos.

  2. Percussion stuff. I have about a million percussion libraries all full of really cool sounding samples, and I don’t use 90% of them because banging on a midi keyboard trying to find the right sample is a really sucky way to do most percussion instruments. Even good libraries are a pain to use. I realized the problem when I was using Addictive drums just wanting to get a shaker sound. It was really really hard to do unless you happened to use one of their premade beats that was intended for shaker. Way too much work for a simple shaker sound. So I want to make a plugin that solves that problem. I’m not sure exactly how to do it yet, but I have some ideas.

But again, all this has to come after the rewrite. I’m considering hiring another developer to help with the rewrites so I can still make new stuff, but a big part of me still really likes working alone, so I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

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#3

This is an interesting implementation of a midi percussion interface using a phone. It’s an app called Rassel by Klevgrand

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CYdq01MvOZq/?utm_medium=copy_link

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#4

I’m just now having to re-write a middleware server I’d built in Flask Python, then found out half way through it that very few devs in the company are comfortable maintaining stuff in Python. Had to take the logic and re-write everything with a different server side framework (ended up with node JS).

OMG… yes! It takes a special type of individual to actually enjoy that. I hate it too. Never had to deal with musical instrument samples, but collecting and organizing sound effects for film was enough to drive me insane.

I LOST COUNT of how many times I’ve needed a simple shaker and had to load an instance of NI battery and had do drill thought a shit ton of libraries to achieve this. Same damn problem with a tambourine. Basically people seem to take for granted how HARD it is to replicate anything you shake when you have a ‘one shot / single’ sample.

I wish someone would make a Hi-hat. JUST a hi-hat plugin. I’m not kidding you. The amount of screwing around with key mapping the behavior of a midi-triggered clutch is insane.

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