Gripe: "Wastin' Away Again in Rosettaville"

[BobK]

I started a new topic about favorite reverbs here:

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=73406

Great! Thanks, James!

[James Steele]

I started a new topic about favorite reverbs here:

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=73406

Great! Thanks, James!

Glad to do it. I think that is a discussion that many of us will find useful. Plus, it's a nice break to the "this-isn't-working-how-do-I-fix-it" posts that are the usual fare lately.

[James Steele]

Fun with the meme generator:

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/48156 ... n-computer

Yeah... too much coffee this morning. Enough playtime today... I better get back to work!

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[James Steele]

Gonna get kicked off the official TC Electronic forum in 3... 2... 1.... Seriously though, the rep their has basically ignored users posts in that topic for 5 months.

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[Michael Canavan]

You can ad in Air, Nomad Factory, Iced Audio, Ohm Force, and there are still significant PSP plug ins that are not Apple Silicon native.

In case anyone wonders, I'm certain most of the time one of the main problems with porting to a new format like Apple Silicon is that the Original developer left, so the company has to either hire them back freelance, (which in the case of NI and Absynth, they decided against), or they have to reverse engineer it. The other scenario is they acquire technical debt from years of patching together hotfixes to get the plug in running on various OS's, NI again admitted this was the case with the rest of their line up and was why it took so long to get to AS.


Anyway not excuses, just explanations. In the case of Audio Ease I'm 100% certain it has to do with Spacial Audio and Dolby Atmos. They're finalizing that at the same time as moving to Apple Silicon, so definitely it's going to cost.

[James Steele]

In the case of Audio Ease I'm 100% certain it has to do with Spacial Audio and Dolby Atmos. They're finalizing that at the same time as moving to Apple Silicon, so definitely it's going to cost.

Yeah... hopefully the Atmos product will be an "XL" type product, as I plan to be firmly in the "stereo ghetto" for a long time and am not looking forward to the hefty upgraded users will have to pay to gain access to native Apple Silicon support. I imagine as an Altiverb 7 owner, I'll be looking at $99 minimum.

[James Steele]

You can ad in Air, Nomad Factory, Iced Audio, Ohm Force, and there are still significant PSP plug ins that are not Apple Silicon native.

Nomad Factory seems like it was on hiatus for a long time since the passing of Bernie Torelli. I honestly don't expect much of their back catalog to every make it to native Apple Silicon. I have most of their plugs and I think only thing AS-native was a new plug called 80s spaces. Fortunately, they nearly all work with Rosetta.

PSP is well along in the native Apple Silicon support. Everything of theirs I own is AS-native and they just released more recently.

Can't speak to Air, Iced Audio, or Ohm Force. Isn't Iced Audio's product Audio Finder... the app? Not a plugin?

[Michael Canavan]

PSP is well along in the native Apple Silicon support. Everything of theirs I own is AS-native and they just released more recently.

PSP N2O, Neon HR, and Master Comp are not native, so you must not own those at least.

Can't speak to Air, Iced Audio, or Ohm Force. Isn't Iced Audio's product Audio Finder... the app? Not a plugin?

Yes it's an app, Audio Finder is not native. Air are being used code wise for AKAI MPC embedded plug ins it seems, they bottomed out their ability to sell them for more than pennies with too many blow out sales. Ohm Force had personal issues I guess, they will make new versions and give some discount to old customers, but who knows how long that will take.

[BobK]

Found this on the Audio Ease Facebook page, posted on May 15:

We are close, but we are not done yet. Apple silicon and Avid’s timeline supporting silicon crossed our Altiverb 8 implementation, on which we have been non stop working at for over two years now. As you know Altiverb has been around for 25 years now, which means significant parts of its inside had to be modernised.

At the same time we are adding long awaited features, and are also going back in our recording vault to retrieve previously unselected microphone positions so we can make Atmos reverbs. Everything without breaking backward compatibility: your 15 year old sessions need not only to open with Altiverb 8, but also sound the same as they did with Altiverb 5.

Announcing a release date encourages us to leave issues in the software, so we have not put ourselves on a deadline.
It is our nr 1 priority though, and we are close, in the final stages, but not yet there.

[James Steele]

Yep... I get it. That was 3 months ago. A quarter of a year. Maybe another update might be useful?

[James Steele]

PSP is well along in the native Apple Silicon support. Everything of theirs I own is AS-native and they just released more recently.

PSP N2O, Neon HR, and Master Comp are not native, so you must not own those at least.

Here's what I do own of PSP:

Lexicon PSP42x
PSP2445
BussPressor
Echo
FETpressor
HertzRider2
Impressor
InfiniStrip
MasterQ2
oldTimer
PianoVErb
SpringBox
Twin-L
PSP N20


As you noted, PSP N20 is not AS native, but that that plugin is very old. The installer notes describe it as "Mac OSX 32bit & 64bit." When they even bother to mention 32-bit, you know it's ancient. The AU component file is dated 3/31/2011... over 12 years old so that one might never have been destined for retirement? I'm just saying a good portion if not most of their catalog has made the jump, so I can't lump them in with companies like TC Electronic, Boz or Lexicon.

As far as AudioEase goes, it's not like they have a huge number of different products, but I imagine their efforts are complicated because they're not simply porting Altiverb 7 to run native, but they're pretty much making significant additions and enhancements, which no doubt won't be cheap. But if you want native Apple Silicon support, we'll pay it.

Can't speak to Air, Iced Audio, or Ohm Force. Isn't Iced Audio's product Audio Finder... the app? Not a plugin?

Yes it's an app, Audio Finder is not native.

Right. I just thought it necessary to state that because it seems like it's not quite as big a deal if an app is not native as if it's a plug in. Given what Audio Finder does, is the user going to feel an appreciable difference? Audio Finder not being native doesn't force a Cubase user or Pro Tools user to run launch those apps in Rosetta. We're pretty lucky that DP uses Audio Units and that Apple built in a method to run non-native AUs in Rosetta individually without having to launch DP in Rosetta.

Air are being used code wise for AKAI MPC embedded plug ins it seems, they bottomed out their ability to sell them for more than pennies with too many blow out sales. Ohm Force had personal issues I guess, they will make new versions and give some discount to old customers, but who knows how long that will take.

I guess with smaller developers like Ohm Force things can happen. I think all of this is exacerbated by the fact that some of these companies like TC or Lexicon *should* have the resources to have done this by now. Most other developers have. But they would gain a lot of goodwill by poking their heads up every so often to give users some sort of sense of the progress. As I mentioned, on some of these forums the company reps have just gone into hiding. There's a topic at the TC forum where the last post from the rep was five months ago essentially saying they're working on it... and should be soon. Five months. Meanwhile I'm getting emails from them constantly hawking their guitar pedals and all the other stuff that's obviously more important to them.

Oh well... Every month or so I poke my head in to check on the progress and it's crickets. Not a peep.

[Michael Canavan]

As you noted, PSP N20 is not AS native, but that that plugin is very old. The installer notes describe it as "Mac OSX 32bit & 64bit." When they even bother to mention 32-bit, you know it's ancient. The AU component file is dated 3/31/2011... over 12 years old so that one might never have been destined for retirement? I'm just saying a good portion if not most of their catalog has made the jump, so I can't lump them in with companies like TC Electronic, Boz or Lexicon.

Yeah I really do hope they make a new version of N2O, it was a great idea poorly executed because of a silly skeuomorphic GUI that got in the way rather than made it fun to use. The Stereo Pack became a single plug in, the Mix pack is being farmed out to single instruments etc.

As far as AudioEase goes, it's not like they have a huge number of different products, but I imagine their efforts are complicated because they're not simply porting Altiverb 7 to run native, but they're pretty much making significant additions and enhancements, which no doubt won't be cheap. But if you want native Apple Silicon support, we'll pay it.

Yeah they pretty much said they would get close, then some new version of AAX, Apple Silicon or revision to Spacial Audio etc. would get in the way. I'm OK with paying, it's been somewhere around 12 years since Altiverb 7 came out, that's a lot of Apple, Microsoft updates and plugin/DAW support for no cash income on their part.

Right. I just thought it necessary to state that because it seems like it's not quite as big a deal if an app is not native as if it's a plug in. Given what Audio Finder does, is the user going to feel an appreciable difference? Audio Finder not being native doesn't force a Cubase user or Pro Tools user to run launch those apps in Rosetta. We're pretty lucky that DP uses Audio Units and that Apple built in a method to run non-native AUs in Rosetta individually without having to launch DP in Rosetta.

This is all true, I'm slightly butthurt at Iced Audio though, it's obviously one guy, a great all in one tool for audio outside DP, but he went silent for almost two years, His forums went bananas with people wondering whether he had abandoned ship, then last month he announced in his news section that Audio Finder was going to be ported to Apple Silicon, at the same time jettisoning the forums on his site.

Since it isn't native it can have a lifespan, i.e. some version of Mac OS can kill it in an update, so silence is not golden here.

I guess with smaller developers like Ohm Force things can happen. I think all of this is exacerbated by the fact that some of these companies like TC or Lexicon *should* have the resources to have done this by now. Most other developers have. But they would gain a lot of goodwill by poking their heads up every so often to give users some sort of sense of the progress. As I mentioned, on some of these forums the company reps have just gone into hiding. There's a topic at the TC forum where the last post from the rep was five months ago essentially saying they're working on it... and should be soon. Five months. Meanwhile I'm getting emails from them constantly hawking their guitar pedals and all the other stuff that's obviously more important to them.

Oh well... Every month or so I poke my head in to check on the progress and it's crickets. Not a peep.

IMO it's that scenario I mentioned, technical debt and the original developer not working for the company anymore. Those things make it that much harder to port the plugin over. IMO though, it's all GUI stuff, hardly any underlying code is going to be affected by being on Windows, or Mac OS, the interface code is the difference, unless the developer cut corners or did something weird. Still, that is a huge part of a plug in or application.

[James Steele]

Right. I just thought it necessary to state that because it seems like it's not quite as big a deal if an app is not native as if it's a plug in. Given what Audio Finder does, is the user going to feel an appreciable difference? Audio Finder not being native doesn't force a Cubase user or Pro Tools user to run launch those apps in Rosetta. We're pretty lucky that DP uses Audio Units and that Apple built in a method to run non-native AUs in Rosetta individually without having to launch DP in Rosetta.

This is all true, I'm slightly butthurt at Iced Audio though, it's obviously one guy, a great all in one tool for audio outside DP, but he went silent for almost two years, His forums went bananas with people wondering whether he had abandoned ship, then last month he announced in his news section that Audio Finder was going to be ported to Apple Silicon, at the same time jettisoning the forums on his site.

Since it isn't native it can have a lifespan, i.e. some version of Mac OS can kill it in an update, so silence is not golden here.

Yeah. You make a very good point about lifespan! Some day in the future, Apple will strip the code from MacOS that supports running the Intel apps and then they'll just be those dreaded icons with the line through them.

I'm in a pickle with my very old office Mac, because I have a very important database that's running on Filemaker's Bento. It was a great app, and I suspect it might have been cannibalizing sales of their flagship app, Filemaker Pro, so they killed it off. High Sierra is the last version it will run on, and even then it has some issues that fortunately there are workarounds for. I'm looking for a replacement so I can move on from it. There's an app called Tap Forms, I believe, that will import the database, but using it is not nearly as elegant as Bento.

[James Steele]

You can ad in Air, Nomad Factory, Iced Audio, Ohm Force, and there are still significant PSP plug ins that are not Apple Silicon native.

Nomad Factory seems like it was on hiatus for a long time since the passing of Bernie Torelli. I honestly don't expect much of their back catalog to every make it to native Apple Silicon.

I love it when I'm wrong!!!

Especially in THIS context.

Just saw this. There's a beta out for Nomad Factory's Pultec clone EQ plugin "Pulse-Tec" that is Apple Silicon native:

https://www.nomadfactory.com/news/n229- ... a-Version/

Best thing of all... it says this at that link (emphasis mine):

As part of our commitment to Upgrade ALL Nomad Factory Products, we are pleased to announce the pre release of the Pulse-Tec EQs V2 (final beta version).

The official release will be in early September but users can download the final beta version as of today and post comments in our development forums.

Pulse-Tec EQs v2 features a completely rewritten DSP code, a brand new resizable UI with two skins, the new HLF-3 filter module, along with many other improvements...

*This will, as always, be a FREE Upgrade for all previous owners ???? **Pulse-Tec EQs V1 will remain in your plug-in folder (for backward compatibility)

Oh happy day! I have the VIP Bundle, and I never thought the Nomad Factory stuff would see the light of Apple Silicon day. i thought 80s Spaces was a one-off because it was a new product. This is great news! ECHOES and MAGNETIC were a couple of my other favorites as well as the Blue Tube Analog TrackBox. NICE!!!

[Michael Canavan]

Oh happy day! I have the VIP Bundle, and I never thought the Nomad Factory stuff would see the light of Apple Silicon day. i thought 80s Spaces was a one-off because it was a new product. This is great news! ECHOES and MAGNETIC were a couple of my other favorites as well as the Blue Tube Analog TrackBox. NICE!!!

Yeah they said before the end of 2023, I had forgotten they stated that. IMO the Pulse Tech is probably my favorite plug in of theirs. Followed by Retro EQs, Magnetic etc.

I really really wish Air wasn't dead in the water. Loom II, Transfuser, and Hybrid 3 all have their uses. Especially Loom II, nothing else like it.