UI and UX in Audio Programming w/ Chris Randall (Audio Damage) | Ep 03

Hey, what's up everybody? Before we get started, I just wanted to make a very quick announcement. So since the time that I've started tutorials on the audio programmer, very much as a beginner in C++ myself, people have continuously come up to me and asked me about great courses for learning C++. And of course, we have programs on sites such as U2Me and PluralSight, but they're more kind of generalist C++ things. There aren't any courses out there that are specifically catered towards what we do as audio programmers. Well, luckily, there's a person, a lot more experienced than myself, that has done a very comprehensive course on learning C++. So his name is Matt Kat Music and he's a member of the audio programmer community and you may have seen him on the juice forum if you've been there. And he's created a course that is very comprehensive. So if you have no coding experience, if you never typed in line with code, then he helps you get started on downloading your first IDE, whether you're on Windows or Mac, and he'll take you from the very basic concepts of learning like stuff like functions and what are variables all the way up to more complex concepts such as Lambda functions, R-value references and things that I haven't quite got a grasp on myself. So he takes you all the way from the beginning, all the way up to these complex concepts. And the best part about it is that it's catered specifically for audio programming. So the course is only on sale for the next two weeks. So you've only got two weeks to buy it. And then what happens is that the course then opens up and then for the next five or six weeks, you will have access to Matt Kat and he will have his own private Slack channel where he'll basically be able to work with you and answer any questions that you may have about the course. So if you order over the next week, then you actually save 33%. If you use my discount code, which is the audio programmer. So to find out more information, you can come to my website, the audioprogrammer.com. You click on the link here and then it will lead you to a page where you can actually buy the course and you can get your discount code and it runs you through the course that one. So go and check it out. Once again, the website is the audioprogrammer.com. Just click on the link called programming for musicians and be sure to use the discount code, the audio programmer on checkout. I'd like to welcome you back to the audio programmer podcast. And this week we have a very special guest, Chris Randall, who's from audio damage. How's it going Chris? Oh, it's great. Yeah, great. So Chris is coming to us all the way from New Mexico, right? No, Arizona. Arizona. I see I kind of group all those together. Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. That's why that's why that's what happens when you're living in a good too long. New Mexico is weed and math. Arizona is on the week. Oh yeah. I can see this is going to kick off into a great podcast. Great. So just a quick announcement. If you want to support the channel, be sure to head over to patreon.com/theaudioprogrammer. We have loads of rewards, t-shirts, hoodie, stickers and everything. So you can get all hooked up with that. Also, we have tickets on sale for the audio developer conference, which is coming up in November. And I think that's a great place for us to start Chris. So just last week, Chris came to me and he had a great idea for a panel for the audio developer conference, which is going to be around product design and product development. So a lot of these conferences, you know, we talk about the C++ and the math and the DSP and everything. But we don't really have a whole lot of product talks. So I think that that's a great place to start. Yeah, go ahead. That's the thing at the end of the day, you know, most people get into this business because they want to be in the business and sell things, you know. And I've been watching these conferences for years in Gondo Fu and it's always super math heavy. And I'm a designer. I'm not, you know, I barely graduated college. So I don't earn graduate high school. I never went to college. So I don't have the while I find it interesting to watch someone talk about filters for 45 minutes, you know, at the end of the day, I don't take much away from it. Whereas, you know, when I watch design conferences and they always have interesting panels on, you know, on design, I thought that and our industry is so particular, the needs of plug in design particularly. It's so, you know, it's a unique form of expression. And at least since part of design goes in it, I thought it'd be nice to have a panel that was just devoted to that. Yeah, that's great. And we've got some other people where we're still shuffling chairs in terms of who's actually on and who's not. But I think I think we're going to have a very promising lineup for that. So let's just jump into that a little bit. So can you talk a little bit about your design philosophy and just what you think of when because So Chris is, he owns audio damage and it's you and another guy. Yeah. Yeah, Adam Shaftek is he does the, he does all the math he bit. So the DSP and bookkeeping, you know, they had an I do the design and the customer facing sort of things. Anything that the customer sees I did, anything that actually makes sound he did. Yeah. How that how we divide things up. Yeah, when I, I was a professional musician before this for for some time and and Darwin gross from exactly 74 and his head that I could design that since I had I had obviously like I have a visual sense and and he thought that I would I would do okay design plugins. So he he wrote me into a into this mode package for it was an extension. Sharia keep it in my desk. I know the cameras wobbly. That's all right. You made this mode. It's an extension to plug-o back in the day around 2001. I guess it came out. And and so he had that was the first time I designed anything for audio and and had done album covers and you know ship like that but then he he brought some the project was a little too big for the two of us in retrospect. You know it wasn't but we didn't know many better. And so he brought in someone else from second 74 Adam and Adam and I hit it off and we thought it was kind of silly to make plug-o which required this plug-o framework from second 74 to work. Uh-huh. When we could just make normal plugins and this was a fairly new like to dish go start a plugin company wasn't really something you anyone knew they could do. You know they weren't very they were probably only a dozen or so when we started. Uh-huh. And what year is this? Oh 2002. Okay. So yeah there wasn't any there was a lot of like hey I made this plugin you know and put it on my website but there wasn't a lot of actually making a go at it as a business model other than you know the bigger companies. I think home force was around then. Uh-huh. Out of its native instruments was and uh but most of the plugins you got were NIR or uh or Steinberg had made them and uh or they were freebies like the uh destroy effects stuff smart electronics. And uh so it was kind of a new thing when we did it and I just brought in the uh the same ethos I had because we my wife and I owned a record label you know at the time and so we just market that is how I know how to market stuff you know is I'm a lifer in the music business this is all I've ever done and that's all I know so uh-huh. We just we marketed plugins the same way we did you know T-shirts and and CDs and it turned out to work out okay. Yeah and what is that what do you feel what do you feel that is and how do you how do you feel that when you were marketing these plugins how did you take the experience from uh from selling the CDs and the T-shirts? Well I was the label I was on in the 90s uh wax tracks was fairly fairly famous and the and like most bigger indie labels at that time it had a per- like wax tracks had a personality played against them and you have had a personality warp had a personality. I still have SST had it so like you could just buy the label yeah and uh and you would know what you were going to get for the most part and we we carried that over into our own label you know the label has a has a personality and then when we started out of your image you know it just it right in the name you know it was like all right this isn't just gonna be EQs and compressors you know and uh well I say just that's a much harder thing to do than what we do to make a good model of an LA you know two A or whatever is a hard thing to do and uh But to come up with new ways of approaching sound design, I suppose, and production, and to be a little more aggressive and risqué, I suppose, than what was available at the time. And so yeah, I just brought all that forward to where the company has a personality rather than individual products defining it. Okay, you generally know which, I mean, we make a few cents if you, you know, affects whatever. You generally know that you're going to get something that is musical and hopefully I think good looking and easy for a musician to use. You know, all sort of stuff, you don't have to crack the manual, you know. It's an aesthetic, like my main thing, it's very big about writing very good manuals. And we do have good manuals, but I'd prefer you never have to look at it, you know. And if you have to look at it, then I didn't do my job well. You should be able to look at the plug and know what it does and know what every individual control does. There's nothing hidden. You know, there's no multi, you know, keyboard command, anything of that sort. I think that's why I should translate so well to iOS because I kind of, and there's a Frenchie just why. I got six, I got six dogs, so that's one of them. Those things crack me up. Anyhow, so it was just like kind of bringing that whole concept of where you kind of generally know. And as a result, we have customers that just, they don't even download a demo or list of the audio files, they just see a new plug and come and they buy it. Like I used to do with my favorite record labels, you know. And so in general, it worked. I mean, I make, we make final living, you know, I'm not really sure anything, but I can afford things. Yeah. Yeah. You can afford some, amazing. You can afford some soup as well as I could see back there. That's right. You got these make them. If you're in the tape music like I am and you did the tape loop in all that, this is the best tensioner you can find. I use it to tension the tape loops and stuff. Nice. They're like the perfect weight and they're wrapped in paper that's real durable. So that's forever. That's great. Big fan of the soup can tension. That's awesome. I have so many questions. I'm not sure where to start. So, so you brought up, so let's keep on this for a second. So, so you feel personality is very important when it comes to making a good product and the point. Well, yeah, the, I mean at the end of the day, your customer's a musician. So, so he's a, she, they are a, a visual thinker in the first place. They're a creative thinker. And obviously they're making music instead of doing actuary tables or something. So they prefer that. And as a musician myself, I don't like to use things that look like Excel spreadsheets or, you know, like a Melodon is a good example. And in no way, bagging on anybody else in the business, they made a killer product out the shoot and it's the best at what it does. But for me, as a musician, I do not like to look at it. And if I don't like to look at it, I'm not any use it. I'm not going to, you know, I don't want to deal with it. I can, I'll record the sound at a different, at a different, you know, frequency. I don't need to go in and, yeah, or get it right the first time. I don't need to go in and fix it. Yeah. If I was doing audio repair or production of other people's music, obviously that would be a much bigger part of my tool set. Yeah, it does have kind of a clinical aesthetic to it, doesn't it? Exactly. And like stuff like that, they just don't appeal to me. So I don't think of it when I'm creating, when I'm in the process of creation, it doesn't pop into my head as something that is going to, you know, work with, with whatever I do. When in fact, it's one of the best tools made for, you know, but so like just in general, I prefer stuff to, I know that the person listening to your MP3 on their morning walk can't see what plug needs to use. It doesn't fucking matter. That's right. But I got to make this stuff and I want to have a pleasant environment while I do that. Yeah. Well, I'm a strong believer that creating needs to come from the heart and not from the brain. And that the best, it seems like the best music really kind of comes from the emotion that you put into it. Sure. And all of that, if you have to fight your tools, then it's going to affect your motion. Yeah. All of that all works together to make a dope track at the end of the day, you know, your experiences, the environment you're in and when you're making them. And our products are a part of that environment. So, you know, maybe that, you know, you make the best sound in plug-in in the world, but it's ugly. It's not going in my folder, you know, that just, that sounds petty and tripe, but I think a lot of people. What was that, that chorus plug-in that came out a couple days ago, did you see that? No. Oh, it's a free, it's up on Music Radar. It just went up yesterday or the day before, I think. He put out the free chorus plug-in and it looks like it was made with a Myspace kit. Like, I guess. It's super old school graphics and all the press about it was trying so hard to not say that. It's cracking me up. I couldn't tell if the guy is doing it ironically or if that's how I wanted it to look. Like I honestly can't tell. The other stuff he's done looks like that too, so I think I like to think it's ironic, you know, which makes it a good joke. But if it, if he'd like this, this looks fucking great. And it's a little bit sad, but it's still, I mean, the free plug-in so we get this shit. Like, obviously he made something and gave it away and that's cool. Yeah, yeah. But it was just, it was cracking me up. Some of the conversations I was seeing about that plug-in and like other people trying to get it out of the stuff. And what do your thoughts, like before, like it's a four channel compressors or, I mean, a chorus or something. I probably have to call it chorus or something. And what are your thoughts on like skew morphe design versus like vector-based design? He served a purpose early on. I'm guilty of anybody, you know, for doing skew stuff. But, but nowadays it's a parody of itself. Like early on people didn't necessarily know what plug-ins were and this looks just like this thing I have in the rack. And I know how to use it. I don't have to think it off. And there's still a place for it here and there. But I like, my favorite is, and it's hard to do really well, is the semi-schemorphic stuff, like an instrument's does. Where the stuff has a little bit of depth, but it's not part of the character is just to make it pop out of the screen so you can see it better. And that I appreciate, that's very difficult to do. And it's a pain in the ass because you're coding a lot of procedural graphics around a bit math or you have to create a knob procedurally that's skew morphe which is even harder. And it's a difficult task that requires a designer and the people coding the UI to work really closely together. So I really appreciate the admins for really taking that home. Like what does it name it? I think the granular sample player thingy that they put out for complete is the probably the best example. That is a really nice mixture of skew morphe and flat. And yeah, that's like, being able to pull that off and make it attractive and useful is the mark of a real someone's really on the ball as far as design goes. But for like, just to make something that looks like a, unless you're cloning it exactly, just to randomly, you know, make Optimus Prime's taint, you know, it's just dumb. You know, it's a waste of time. You're stuck with these, with these assets that you can't resize. And, you know, it's just, I, that's again, that's all personal taste. We're talking about design and we're talking about subjective opinions. I, there's plenty of plugins I use daily that are skew morphe and I don't give them a second thought. So obviously they did something right. Yeah, yeah. Personally, personally, I would, I, it's like, I'll occasionally, when I'm actually looking, I have next to this window, I have Illustrator open, I'm working on our next product. I have, through the course of this design process, put drop shadows under a couple things and like, delete them. I'm like, it's, it's kind of asking for a little depth, but I'm, I'm so vocal in my anti skew. If I put it in, I know I'd be opening myself up to a whole lot of, you know, peanut gallery comments. All right. I want really good drop. Does it really need a drop shadow or does it just want? It's like having a, doing a business. I think this is not especially, it's like having a toddler around that has no object permanence, you know? It doesn't know what it wants exactly I mean, I'll let it tell me what it means, you know, if something has to be skew, it's gonna be skew and that's yeah, and that's I have been eased, I went fully flat for a couple years Yeah, and I have been easing back a little bit, like I've started putting gradients and stuff Mm-hmm, especially now that windows is high DPI, I can get a little more because gradients on windows are always digital awful with the banding Okay, so I never really liked them that much, but to do the background in a nice smooth gradient, if I can pull that off, I'll do it I've done it in our last two products Nice So, so it is tough to pull the film Yeah, I can imagine So tell me a little bit about your creation process with Adam, so when you're thinking about a product, you have obviously a design Design element to it, Adam may have his ideas in terms of the actual DSP How does that kind of come together in terms of bringing that into one cohesive vision? Well, we have, our process is, we've worked together a long time now, you know, 17 years I think, 18 years, something like that It's a while, and so we kind of got a bulk and mind-mild going We have a Slack channel that's just ideas, so anytime one of us has an idea, we drop it in there And every once in a while we go and scroll back, but it's really a jishmard at Wedged in your brand We actually don't look at the channel very often, right? One's ever written that I generally can remember it When we finish a product, we usually take a couple weeks off, I have to deal with the marketing and all that And he needs to be compressed because most of the final burn to the end is fixing bugs and stuff, and it's like, it's a lot of work And he needs some time After that, and then after those couple weeks or a month or whatever have passed by, we start talking about the next one is And it's kind of what is interesting, either of us at any given point After we've put out, oh, I should, 45 software products and 30 Euro or 25 Euro rec modules So we have a pretty good handle on what is going to sell, like what product is going to sell, so whether we need income or not Like if the last two things we did were just updates, that basically don't make a lot of money A new product makes a lot of money, so we're going to do an update or a new product If we need money, we'll probably do a new product If we're coast and fine, we'll make consider doing a major update to something or whatever So once we have the idea done, then I start, we'll talk about what it's vibe is going to be For the next thing we're doing, when we did our granular sense, Quanto last year, he came up with, I wanted to have like a sad car oscillator in it that could inject right into the grain engine That way you don't even need to load a sample, you got a granular sense with this where an oscillator is providing the sample And it created some new things I've never seen before But the oscillator he came up with was really good and I ended up using Quanto as a monosynth a lot A single oscillator monosynth, which I love the sound of like Yamaha CS5, that sort of thing, I love And then we got to thinking that we should, we had a monosynth product or have a monosynth product basic that I had made for educational market And we got to talking about removing that from the catalog and replacing it with a proper subtractive synth starting with Quanto as oscillator And we're actually in the design process right now where we're going through the tool bag and seeing how we want it to sound like do we want it to be an aggressive thing like for EDM like phase plant or a serum Or do we want it to be a smooth, warm synth? Generally we'll make stuff for what we make, you know, and that's usually the goal, if we're not going to use it we don't make it And then so we get all that in a basket and then we kind of shake it and see what we have I will generally during the course of that mock up do UI mockups and then we'll kind of use those into the I keep looking to the side here because I'm looking at the mock up I'm doing right now I'm telling you this And so that kind of falls to me the flow of it and the general vibe that the product is going to carry Quanto has a specific goal and that's to treat granular like subtractive because like the vast majority of granular synths are kind of you know they accentuate the granular aspect And it's difficult to just drop them in a song and I want to quantit something you grab make it a little grainy and go And so we'd greatly simplified the granular synth process for that product and I'm trying to make this as a sister product to that so it's going to be a greatly simplified, you know, version of what's here I'm in massive And and face planning and products like that accomplish And so it's mostly just sitting around and thinking I actually that's why I have a sofa in my room like my office could be full of musical instruments but I have to have a sofa so I can just sit and stare at the ceiling and think Yeah, I need a lot of room for pacing I'll go out to go out on the back porch and paste around the pool a lot And in that building in my head and and a match in myself using it and trying to come up with interesting things Adam in the meantime is like there's generally we have to invent something for every product So he'll go through and find all the cases of prior art for that in this case we want a particular kind of oscillator so he's going through and oscillator tones and And and putting together the bits and pieces that will make the result we want and and so on and so forth and then once we actually start we make a product project and Jews put it in our repository And I start coding the UI you know what like generally we've decided that it's going to be like this I've made a full mock up in the illustrator and then I'll move into the to the to the While he's putting together the the DSP and so he actually use a start usually starts that because he'll make the parameter list and and all the you know all the e-nums And what not so that I have them ready I don't have to make dummy nods I can actually have the parameter there the values are all right so I can actually do my job which is design and not worry about coding up a lot of shit Yeah, and so the so he will hand me he puts a project in a repository that already has the parameters and everything so we can just start coding the UI Nice I forgot I can actually get pretty technical on this Usually I'm like I make it some blue you know the middle of why of me talking I'm like I'm actually not great at code but I'm good at doing juice U.I.s Uh-huh that's like juice U.I. code I'm all over that but but when you get outside of that I'm I start to get a little lost And do you feel that juice in terms of the UI offers a lot of flexibility or do you feel that you're always trying to wrangle with it or where do you where do you say it at first I I thought it a lot because the way is presented to you is as a just start using their stuff and put it together and make your product and then you end up with a juice plugin It looks like juice the text would say that's actually what I thought was the most is getting the font to where it didn't you couldn't tell it was juice plugin from looking The uh and the looking fight with the looking field class which is like the looking field has had so much stuff added to it over the years Uh-huh by different people so like some controls have a lot of looking field access and some have like one or two things like the call out boxes are goddamn nightmare But no I can do anything you know so it's like very stuff like that after the first couple products I that we did with juice I started just coding everything So I'll use all their their classes I use the button class and and slider class and everything but I do all the graphics in the controls paint Uh-huh and I hardly use like I look I use look at field of store all our colors and some behaviors and then like the like the overall font and that sort of thing And to tame all the drop down menus and all that but for the actual controls I generally I have my own classes that I've made it override there Nice It's hard to get something as well very general to be do something specific. But same token, the nice thing about juice is that I can load it up, throw in there, use the farther tutorials and throw in controls, and get them to look up a little bit like my own and looking feel and ship a product and it'll be fine. That's using great for that. For what the way we work, the main thing we rely on juice for is the fact that we can deploy to so many platforms and that they take care of pro tools, they take care of iOS, they worry about all the little shit so I can concentrate on just making a good plug-in. And that's really the only way to really make a solid living in this business is to have as many possible targets for your product possible and juice is the best there is for that. I say that not having a lot of experience, but so. And to just do it at the base level of VST and then make your own AU, AX, your own iOS, that's your dish, you're not going to make any, you're not going to be able to make enough products to make money and concentrate on that product on the products themselves. You're going to spend all your time writing, heard on SDKs. Yeah, that's right. That's for small shots, if your big shot team with a capital T for that, I would know anything about that. And speaking of multiple targets, so you've been quite active in the iOS market and there's been a lot of talk for some time about mobile apps and that they're going to take over desktop and what are your feelings on that? Well, I like the nice thing about the iOS environment, it was a virgin field. Like two years ago, there was Garaj band and a couple others and that was that, or three years ago. And so you ended up with products like it matrix and AUM, which somebody made to solve a problem they were having or to create a scenario where they can explore some new creative avenues and those have gotten really popular audio and both say matrix. So you have these three big hosts that are entirely modular, they're what you make them. They're not does at all, they're mixers essentially. And I got really excited about that. If you look at my Instagram, you see a lot of me using AUM to make music. It's all real time, of course, but within that context. And so I started using AUM and then I was like, man, I wish I could just bang out juices. It has a check box I can make. I was just in nowhere near that simple, but at the time I was naive. And I was like, oh shit, it builds and works fine. You know, it's like this. And it turned out to be we were the first, I don't want to say real company, but we were the first company with a long track record to really embrace AUB3 and ship like just like we ship everything else. There's the vast majority of our products are identical. That is the same exact code I just built to try OS. Some of them like Quanto we had to end. And so we had to dump down a little bit because they used resources that iOS simply doesn't exist. So like there's a voice limit on Quanto, six-volt design OS. I always would just come to a standstill trying to do 15 voices, but you know, a thousand grain. Or end so just if the end so desktop version, they said, which ends up as a loopers, you know, it can go for like 10 minutes and I was just doesn't have the RAM to do that. So we had to shorten that. But for the most part, they're identical. It didn't start out that way. I was forking, but with iOS 11 picked up a lot of features to where I could use a common preset manager. And like the presets for the iOS versions work on the desktop and vice versa. There, like you can hand off and copy from one to the other. It's crazy. Nice. So it's like in that respect now as far as I'm concerned, it's just one more target. I don't use Pro Tools. I don't care about Pro Tools. We sell a x plug. So I approach iOS the same way is just one more target, like you know, 3264 bit. We don't other than me allowing for the context like in the preset manager and stuff you wouldn't see as a consumer. I just generally, I design with the thought that the user could be using either amount of mouse or a finger or finger. Their finger. And that it needs to be visible at small and big sizes. You need to be able to tell what's going on. So that the plug in itself doesn't really care what context is running in. And it provides an experience that's similar across all devices. For that reason, I don't know. Those sliders, because they suck on with your finger, like going up on a vertical slider on a touchscreen is awful because your finger bunches up and you can't do it accurately. I don't ever use a right click for anything. I don't use any modifier keys for anything. Because then I don't have to think about how to accomplish the same thing in iOS. It does work. And that's like doing that kind of design at the front makes hoarding much easier. There's nothing special to allow for in iOS or any other DAW. But the downside is that we can't do crafty little things like right click on this to make it do something or stuff like that. The best that I can do is long press, double click, that sort of thing. But there's no hover states, none of that, which actually makes the front end design easier. If I set these strict limits, I can't have hover states, can't have right click, can't have modifier keys, and no vertical sliders. Those are the bounds I'm working with in. I don't have to, oh man, I really wish I had this thing on here that I don't have here. Never have to worry about that. So we designed to a lowest common denominator that includes an iPad. But that's a result of having learned all that over the first couple. It was like Jesus Christ, you know what happened. But now I choose that or of course I don't really think about it. And what about the price point between iOS and that's smart. Yeah, that took some real soul search in there. Because we charge what we charge. We're less expensive than most companies with our kind of catalog. But by the same token, you don't have people, man, in the phones 24/7. And I can't charge for something. I can't give them, you know. Like I can't charge you $190 for something when you want to be able to call and say, how do I get this to work? I'm not going to answer my phone because it's all fucking robocalls. So we price according to what we need to make to keep making. Basically. So with iOS, obviously a $59 plug and we're going to sell one. You want to sell it? The context doesn't have the ecosystem that Windows and Mac OS have. It doesn't have an easy pathway to record a song, record your vocals and guitar, mix it well, commercial quality and put it out. Whereas both a Windows machine and a Mac OS machine can do that easily, isn't there built for it? Taking that into account, even though the product is identical, you are not getting the full experience that having our products run in Pro Tools would provide you. So I can't in good faith charge you the same. I just can't. A couple of that was the fact that people, Apple for whatever reason has created a scenario where race to the bottom is a thing. It's mathematical proof that pricing below equal similar products will mean you'll sell more than that. It's just a fact. So we just came up with a policy, a dish, a lot enough and seeing what that got us. Because I don't have a boss, it's me, I can change it whenever I want if I don't feel it's working. So there's no police are going to come to my house if I decide to change the price back dollars. So I tend to fiddle with the iOS prices a little bit. I had talked to another developer that was in a similar scenario as we were and he and I agreed to, well, I can't say agreed, that's the violation of Rico, but I had a thought of feeling with our prices and seeing where a comfort level was. And so we've been doing that for a few months and. And, uh, SWAT teams, that's your door. I think you're coming. the fucking FBI, the fucking rack of Gary Sharpe. Yeah, that's price-dicting, you can't do that, but we've discussed it like if we all kind of tried to move the ecosystem in it. 'Cause you end up with a lot of people on iOS that just buy it 'cause it's cheap. Like, oh, this looks like fun looper. I know what looper is, you know, and they buy it. And so it's a very complex product. It's most of our products are super simple and it's obvious. But, and so, it needs a particular need for people that have to do things this particular way. And it's fairly complex. So I actually have to do more support for that product than all of our others combined. So it came out. Just 'cause people just buy it for cheap on iOS and they don't understand what they've got. They think it's gonna be like loopier or something like that and it's not at all. It clones a tape looper, you know, so it's a complex process. So, long story short, yeah, I sure I'd love to charge the same on iOS, but they're not getting it. Like, if you buy the desktop version, you've got it on both Mac and Windows. You've got it in four formats and two bit apps. And it'll work forever, you know? Whereas iOS is subject to Apple's whims, you buy that one. We have no way to sell you that one with the desktop products. We have no way to sell you the desktop products with that one. It is its own entity. So I kind of work it out the way you would buy one of the other 10 formats we sell. You only get one, so it's the 10th of the cost. It just worked out that way. Like I said, we've been fiddling with the presses a little bit, but on the whole, we were right the first time. iOS sells at the end of the day, it holds its weight, you know, we make a fair chunk of our yearly income from that format alone. So if I sold any of the other formats, I think they would do what iOSAUB3 does. So as a single format, it's probably our largest user base is iOSAUS. And so the money worked out fine. It smarts a little bit to laugh that zero off when you just work for six months on something, you know, 10 hours a day, but at the end of the day, it's out good. So I got complaints. And have you seen the shift in terms of the number of sales that you got on your desktop apps versus iOS apps? Have you seen a shift in that in recent years or does it maintain-- iOS outsells desktop about eight to one in numbers. That was from the jump. When we released the first iOS plugin, it did eight times what its desktop version had done, almost immediately. And it's fairly consistent. I think everybody that was going to be an iOS musician pretty much is by now. A lot of people like that, like if you're working garage and you use Audi Densh plugins and garage band, you can send the project to Logic. And if you own the desktop versions, they just show up in their spots where they were. And a lot of people like that sort of behavior. But it's kind of an additional tool to the desktop environment. It's not something that at least at this point can replace it. And once it can, it's just another desktop. So at that point, it's not worth talking about. So it's kind of in a weird spot right now. I don't see the numbers growing hugely in the next while. But they are huge already. So-- You know-- And the planes there. And do you feel the pirating aspect-- It has to be an aspect. I don't really put much thought into that, to be honest with you. I our products don't have DRM at all. So obviously, that's how-- that's what I think about pirates. Fuck you. Do your worst. But yeah, it's real hard to-- are so boy, you're a fucking ace hacker there. Really, really did your mama proud on that one. But who gives a shit? My theory is that there's people that don't pay for stuff. And people pay for stuff. And people pay for stuff and want good stuff. And they want to be able to talk to me if they have a problem. And they want us to keep making stuff. And there's enough of those people to allow me to live and make stuff for a living. So beyond that, I don't think about it. There is almost no-- iOS, obviously. I think that the price makes things a bit disposable. Like someone will buy something if it doesn't work. They don't even ever tell me. So I end up not knowing about some problems. But whereas on desktop, I will regularly get people that write us that pirated the product and want support. I'm like, I'm going to take some brass there. But-- [LAUGHTER] All right. A decade. I can smell them out pretty quickly. I don't-- I generally don't even need to look in the customer database. I can tell right away. It's just the way someone asks their questions. Amazing. But yeah, that's always made me laugh. But-- That's my dog. Got a leg thump in situation. The funny thing is she doesn't do that unless I'm having a conversation with somebody. Oh. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I had to shut my door so my cat doesn't come in here. Yeah, let me while. Yeah, I don't-- like a long story short, I don't-- shit about piracy. There isn't any on iOS to speak of. At least not enough to have a number four. And while it exists on desktop, it doesn't really. I'd like there not to be. But we spent so many years fighting it to the nail to no visible effect. I don't want to say I conceded the battle. But I'd stopped giving any sort of remote fuck about it. You know? And our numbers didn't change at all. We took all our DRM out in 2012, 2013, took all the red code shit out. And the one thing I do get this funny is people writing to say they bought something and there was no place to put in a red code. And it seems to work fun, but is there a problem? We get that pretty quickly. Because of the bigger company, we're really the only one that doesn't get mad at them. And-- but at the end of the day, it's a happier customer. And I care-- I don't care about people that stole it. I don't give a shit about them. I care about people that bought it. And if they have-- are having problems because of copyright protection, they're paying the price for the people that stole it. And it's OK for me to pay that price, but they shouldn't have to. Why? That's-- it fucks with their experience. So-- but the corollary that is that I get people writing, thinking that they didn't stole it right, because it's so unusual. Yeah. That's where we're at, though. Obviously, we do find. So I'm not too concerned about it at this point. Do you feel that the strongest way to combat that is to build a great product? It's a great product. Eewoo, you're good. I think there's a point where it's diminishing in returns. I mean, Logic-- Logic X doesn't have copyright protection. It has-- you have to sign end to get updates. But you can just-- if you've got a friend that bought Logic X, you can just put it on your machine and use it. Unrestricted. And that does not affect the ability of Apple to make money off of Logic. So-- and obviously, I have my problems with that, but they're largely technical. As a creative environment, it's one of the best there is. And so that being the case, it's a bit of a post-tock period or a prop-dark policy, because Mac OS is inherently locked down. But at the end of the day, this is a major product that has no copyright protection. And Alive's is almost-- or able to live is almost transparent. You just log in the app, and that's that. Bitwig is the same way. So you don't really notice the protections that are there. And that's the way it should be, as long as the customer never really knows. Then-- or doesn't have to think about it at all. It's not like some stuff where you have to log in repeatedly. I hate that. Like where it times out, and you have to re-log in. That kind of shit-- I'll just stop using it. I don't care. It's like you're punishing me for someone else's bullshit. I just not use your shit. And the more abusive you make it, the more you end up worrying about that and then not the product. How to make the product safe. Does it even need to be safe if it's no fun to use? You know? That's right. Yeah, it's just-- I don't know. I've had a lot of discussions about this over the years, because obviously I'm fairly opinionated on it. But I find that the people that spend the most that have successful copy protection that works, spend a lot, a lot of time thinking about it and dealing with it and researching it and finding all the cracks out there and dealing with them. I spend that time living my life. So, like if that's your hobby, finding and perfecting, you know, copy protection holes, then you enjoy that. God bless, but that's not for me. I got to do it. Yeah. So to answer your question, no, I don't think that the product itself is, I don't really remember what the question was. I don't either. So obviously there are a lot of indie developers out there. You could have for a second there. There are a lot of indie developers out there. Yeah. And there's a lot of discussion in terms of how to make a living as an indie developer. I keep losing your audio. Do you? I lost you after discussion. So there's a lot of discussion where I lost my thoughts there. Oh nice. So there are a lot of independent developers out there and there's a lot of discussion in terms of how to make money and how to make a living as an independent developer. What do you think that a lot of indie developers are missing in terms of being able to make a living off of this? Well, they should have started 15 years ago. Bar and that. I think that there's a general from what I've seen for people discussing it. There's a general theory that if you just put it out there, they'll show up. But that doesn't really play out in this because you're a needle in a haystack and the customer just sees the haystack and he's going to grab the first needle he finds if it's yours. That's awesome. But early on, you have to really talk people into and however you choose to do that promotion. I'm terrible at promoting stuff. But by the time I've tweeted an Instagram to about it, I've already moved on. So I have to actually really pay attention to that. It's like any product that you have to get it in front of the people that are likely to use it and tell them why. How you go about that, there's a lot of ways to skin that cap. Speaking strictly for us, because of the way in which we did the company in the early days, as I was speaking before about the record label concept, we have a dedicated group of customers that we can rely on that for, we know we're going to make this when we put this out and we can plan for that. Without having that, I honestly am not entirely sure how one would approach it. If you make good shit, it's going to get out there. But that's really at the end of the day. If it's a good product, it will eventually, but paying while eventually is happening is a problem. And this is a business that to make a good product requires a lot of time and dedication. And that's hard to do when you're going to work a subway during the day or whatever. So I think it's the same as with any business, is that you go all in do your best and either the market will be happy with it or that won't. I think that's the same about anything. If a coffee shop opens up and it's pretty, but the coffee sucks, they're not going to do well. By the same token, if they got really good coffee, but they're in the ass end of the parking lot that's in an empty strip mall for blocks over, you'll still go because it's good fucking coffee. But you got to find out about it if you don't know it's there. So I think that in that respect, this business is unique in as much as we're dealing most of us are musicians and we're dealing with musicians. But that makes it its own thing. But on the whole, I think that business is at the end of the day. Yeah. You make a good product and promote it. And if the consumer base agrees with you, then you'll be able to make another one. It's not brain surgery. People have been doing business for a couple of days. Yeah. That's not. That said, I do stumble through it. It took us to quite a few years. And that's the best advice I can give to somebody starting out is that it's not going to happen overnight. So rarely do you hit over the fence on the first try. And even if you do, you don't have the resources necessary to tell people that you did it. Unless someone was there, a video can't, they didn't happen. So to stick with it, I did damage was around for six years before I got a patient. You know, it barely paid for itself for the first three years. And point of fact, Adam, who had more income than I was a musician, I had a fucking money at all. Adam had a real job. Adam actually, you know, financially supported the company for the first few years of his life. So it did take us a while and just without hardly any competition. You know, we were, you know, we were a market of like a couple dozen by the time we got rolling. So now there's, you know, hundreds of plug-in companies. If not thousands. Yeah. So there's not as many plug-in companies as they're our girlfriend company. That's something to think about for a market that's a hundred times the size. There's less companies. That's crazy. Yeah. It is. There's a reason we stop doing that. But in any case, the, yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, like my most business is most models don't do well early on. And it's your ability to muscle through that. You know, I work two or three jobs until, you know, about 2007, 2006, when, uh, home, we were able to prepare to, and then it was probably 20, 11 before I started making enough money to, like, to where I didn't have to worry about. We weren't bouncing, you know, or we weren't betting credit card bills back to other credit cards, you know, shit like that. Uh-huh. Right about 2011. So, so it to say 10 years to, to make a living, like a solid middle class living. Yeah. And, uh, and I don't make a lot, luckily, there's been no inflation for the last decade, but I don't make a lot more than I did in 2011. So I've gotten better at dealing with what we make and, and making it work for me. Like I didn't, I didn't write a check for that. You know, I have good, I have very good credit and sweet water didn't know interest. So, uh-huh. So it's not like I went to the guitar center and dropped $6, $6,000 bills on the table and say, give me one of those, you know, I could, I could not do. Yeah. Uh, the, uh, you know, so it's not especially lucrative business to begin with. And it's another thing that helps us a lot is that we have a very large product. Like, you know, we have now 45 catalog numbers. So, uh, obviously only 15 or so are available in a given time. Um, but because we have a broad swath and it's, you, it's relevant to the current styles of music, then, uh, like, uh, that's actually a good point. If you make a specific cue or compressor, you kind of have to hope it works in modern music. Uh, but if you make something that's new and, uh, then it will inherently work in modern music because it's modern. So, uh, uh, uh, I, I try to, I don't like to clone. Like we're going to make the perfect, like, Valhalla is the best at that. There's no reason to, or, or you, universal audio. There's no reason to do it because they do it so well. Uh, like Sean just spent four years fine going through with magnifying glass on tape delays to make, make Valhalla delay. And there's no point in us approaching that at all. A, I don't have that kind of OCD and B, uh, it's, it would be counterproductive for us to do it. We need, you know, uh, the, uh, but to have a nice big swath of modern relevant plugins will ensure it's like a little pass filter on your income, you know, you're always going to do something. And as long as you're always doing something, you can plan your life accordingly, you know. So, every once in a That's why we get a nice big bump on. I have a product out, but on the whole our idle is what we live on. Nice. Oh, yeah, I think I'm in no way complaining. The fact that I can, you know, sit in this room and, and, and just think about knobs all day, it's fucking awesome. Yeah. Is the best, best job ever for me. Not a bad job at all, is it? No, no, I'm not complaining.