Music software development includes some of the most sophisticated, expressive software out there. But it has long faced serious challenges in sales – audio software still appeals, generally, to a small slice of people, made smaller by factors ranging from piracy to the sheer complexity of available audio tools. As computing’s distribution model for software shifts, audio developers are undoubtedly watching.

Love it or hate it, what’s unique about Apple’s App Store for iOS is that it’s a one-stop shop for everything. With App Store fever spreading – new stores for mobile and desktop are either available or planned from the likes of Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Linux vendor Canonical – we’re likely to see a new kind of store model. On desktops, Android devices, and others, multiple stores will compete with one another in overlapping arenas. They’ll do it without lock-in, too – unlike on Apple’s stores for iOS, you’ll have a choice of where to get your software.

Last week, of course, that list expanded to include Apple’s Mac App Store, coming to Snow Leopard and then the just-announced Lion.

Music creation and pro audio apps may be a specific niche, but creators of everything from plug-ins to audio software are at least interested. Little wonder: desktop music making software has always faced an uphill climb, but recently, iPhone creations have become breakout hits.

Just don’t get too excited yet. An early look at Apple’s guidelines for the store suggest restrictions will rule out a great deal of current Mac software, particularly audio software that relies on plug-in models. I’ve asked some independent developers to comment on what the store means to them, and take a look at some of those restrictions.

Several developers responded to my questions. Now, a disclaimer: clearly, the Mac App Store is not aimed at creators of strange synthesizers and effects. Nor is it possible to represent the full gamut of developers making software for musicians. TUAW has a nice round-up of more typical Mac developers, who are, unsurprisingly, more upbeat. I likewise expect that anyone who now has some success on the iOS platform – vendors like IK Multimedia or Smule — will be optimistic about the Mac App Store.

So, instead, consider this as a sampling of developers for whom the App Store may not actually change that much. I was, frankly, surprised to see plug-in creators and pro audio users assuming that the Mac App Store would be a natural marketplace for the software they care about. Early evidence is that it isn’t. But with app stores spreading across devices, the responses from developers provide some insight into longer-range challenges that transcend even Apple’s latest offering.

Gallery: sample applications and stores.

Could the Apple App Store be a viable option for creative music developers?

Angus Hewlett, FXpansion:

I’d say it’s a viable option for entry-level and somewhat novelty apps, and as a launch-assistance platform for brand new developers (allowing unknowns with no established reputation to get started in the world of ecommerce). It’s not of great appeal to FXpansion – we’ve been around long enough that I’d hope commercial trust isn’t a massive barrier to people buying from our web-store – but as a get-yourself-started platform, it is not completely without merit.

Of course, because these app stores are usually tied to a specific platform, for those developers who are on more than one platform, it does just add additional complexity, cost, and hassle. Admittedly it improves convenience for end users a certain amount (a good thing in my book), but the effort/overhead of getting out your credit card and typing in the number looks completely different for a $0.99 game you’re going to play for 20 minutes, compared to a $249 plug-in that you’ll spend hours/days just learning and (we hope) use several times a week for years to come.

Christopher Randall, Audio Damage:

The guidelines preclude selling plug-ins, so that rules out the segment of the industry I’m most familiar with. This will probably change, but my general feeling is that people that make things like Numerology will be well served, but for the majority of our business, our needs are a bit too particular to really benefit from something as broadly-focused as the App Store. And there’s no real financial incentive on Apple’s part to cater specifically to us, because we’re such a small segment of the overall software market.

David Viens, Plogue Art et Technologie:

As much as we like having our code base tested on as much compilers and platforms possible for correctness and efficiency, constant platform changes are quite boring, and usually dont spark any innovative ideas from us. Innovation not only is what drives us in the morning, but it’s also what users want, hopefully more than the typical will-it-run-on-my-toaster? kind. Also innovation is highly regarded by various tax break programs in many countries Also app stores make it impossible for us to do quick fixes, we could be committing code to Nintendo ROM carts that it couldn’t be different. So there is a need to raise QA and testing budget by a very significant amount, before release….

For standalone software, the kinds of things we’ve seen for iOS seem a likely candidate – particularly general-consumption audio “toys” (in the sense of stuff anyone can open up and use to make sound)?

Chris Randall:

That was my my general thinking. I was pondering it at length last night, and the smaller single-use app seems more likely to benefit from it, assuming it is a parallel environment to the existing App Store, with the same sort of customers. The chief difference between this App Store and the iOS one is that this isn’t the only option for purchasing software for your Mac. It has to compete with other channels, which is an important distinction, especially if most of its offerings are simple “casual” apps.

What about the app store landscape in general, as other players get into the business of doing their own stores? How does Apple fit in?

Gavin Burke, Future Audio Workshop:

The main issue is that the app store model just one piece of a bigger jigsaw and is tied in closely to the hardware, software frameworks and what this means to an independent developer and his/her ability to compete on a level playing field with established brands.

App store success is just one part in a bigger picture. The other players need to get the various parts right and not just create an app store and think it will work.

A major part is the price and ease of purchase. It’s easier to buy the software for $1.00 with one-click purchase than look on rapidshare.com for a crack. So price, ease of purchase, and last but not least, [making it] difficult to get the cracked version. Looking at it, it may only work if there is a single distribution channel and not multiple ones ( including rapidshare as a channel )

One flaw, though, in the Apple App Store is the charts. At the moment it is based on sales volume. Allowing people to view by highest user rating, etc., might help level things. Also, Apple can act as king maker with their ability to dish out the free advert slots on the device.

Angus Hewlett:

It’s a new channel that will no doubt get a lot of coverage – a few developers with the right products and first mover advantage will make some fast bucks for sure. After that, I don’t know. I suspect phones (and consoles – myself, I spend way more on XBox Live Arcade than on the iPhone or Android stores) are a better and more natural platform for cheap, one-shot novelty apps than desktops/laptops, simply because of how & where they fit in to peoples’ lives, but I’m ready to be proven wrong on that.

Are you concerned about Apple’s 30% cut of revenue?

Chris Randall:

Not at all. The app store runs on volume; that is its main attraction from a commerce standpoint. The trick is to take advantage of that potential volume, and the way to do that is through lowest-common-denomenator (e.g. “I Am T-Pain”) products.

Angus Hewlett:

Yes. It’s a lot more than the original generation of “app stores” (shareware ecommerce middleman sites like ShareIt, DigitalRiver, Kagi, NorthStar etc.) typically charged. We used to sell through ShareIt back in the day, they took about 10%, but once your turnover hits $10-15k a month,
it’s more economical to have a proper merchant account based shopping cart system (the hassle that entails costs a few hundred dollars a month in terms of overheads, paperwork, other bank-related BS, but it brings the average cost per transaction down to 3-5%). Also, at 10-15k a month turnover, your brand is probably well enough known that potential customers are likely to trust you somewhat as an online vendor.

Having said that – the terms-and-conditions aspect of being in an app store, especially when the operator is particular, capricious, anally retentive or all three at once (naming no names), is far more toxic than the 30% cut. Losing a predictable amount of money per sale is one thing, but failing to sell a single copy of your app – after you’ve spent months and $thousands developing it – because the store owner rejected it for reasons outside of your control is quite another.

David Viens:

30% is ridiculous. What enrages me is that users seem to think it’s normal and much less than ‘retail’ .. wuht whut??? We have never done retail ever and been using Share-It (which costs us less than 10%) for 6 years. That’s the price of a payment processor.

Sure, it doesn’t give you ‘visibility’ but what is that visibility on the 15th page of music software selection in a store? Can’t we just be as creative with our viral marketing, social network tricks as we are with the software itself?

Bandwidth price on Amazon S3 is microscopic (10 cents a GB), so not an issue, even with 100-megabyte demo downloads.

Share-it don’t care about the content, they never put their noses in our practices, suggest guidelines, or anything.

People are just getting to enjoy their new-found freedom with independent online music and fair-trade and local grown foods, however. they will let the inverse happen to software?
Will we see the movement to Fair-Trade software in 15 years?

Do you think it’s a model that could work, from a business perspective?

Angus Hewlett:

It’s a new channel, a few developers with the right products and first mover advantage will make some fast bucks. After that, I don’t know.

How well versed are you on acoustic physics in relation to loudspeakers, impedance etc.? There are some interesting parallels here with app stores – basically they are a good platform for allowing very small developers to cast a very wide net. Those of us who have a more specialist, focused audience can probably build trust with our audience via more efficient, focused channel….

It appears that plug-ins are ruled out by several of the guidelines issued by Apple. Care to comment?

Gavin Burke:

I can’t see the app store concept working for plug-ins; it’s pretty much already there with the downloads page on the Apple site.

If the app store is the only channel to purchase applications for a device that cracked software is not easily available for, then yes, it works. Otherwise, not so sure. We already have app stores for music software, like Don’t Crac[k], etc., with somewhat limited success. Also for complex niche software, it’s hard to beat the personal connections distributors have with stores and in turn with their customers. We find this especially true for Japan.

Artistic freedom and censorship

Artist and developer Kassen Oud offered some compelling thoughts on Apple’s developer “guidelines” and rules via Facebook. To him, the restrictions on what goes in the store conflict with making software art. I think it’s a reasonable and challenging point to make – just as Apple has the right to conduct their store in the way you wish, developers and artists presumably have just as much right to opt out.

To me, the big appeal to developing software for music is the chance to do something unique and individual. External limitations (like arbitrary moral guidelines or limits on the language to be used) conflict with that, to me. As the process used is important to me I need to be able to express myself about that publicly as well. This rules out Apple’s app store. With regard to code/ application distribution those are more important factors to me than the need to create applications for Apple’s app store on a Apple computer though that in and of itself would also be a prohibitive factor to me.

I don’t mean to imply that software on Apple’s platform would inherently be less “unique” or “individual”; I certainly do not wish to take anything away from my friends whose creative process wasn’t (apparently) affected by these factors and who did create very interesting works released on it, taking nothing away from their FOSS work.

Apple Developer Guidelines – Plug-ins Need Not Apply

Apple’s draft review guidelines for the Mac App Store have been widely posted, including full text. Here are the excerpts most relevant to the above discussion.

Plug-ins will almost certainly be rejected.

2.15
Apps must be self-contained, single application installation bundles, and cannot install code or resources in shared locations

(Plug-ins, by definition, install to shared Library locations, as per Apple’s own guidelines.)

Interestingly, though, hosts appear to be okay, just not the plug-ins themselves:

7.1
Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality with mechanisms other than the App Store will be rejected, except in cases where the application hosts plug-ins or extensions

Demos aren’t allowed.

2.6
Apps that are “beta”, “demo”, “trial”, or “test” versions will be rejected

Other guidelines are worth watching.

Various other guidelines provide fairly restrictive policies that developers will have to balance against their business interests. These aren’t unprecedented – see the strict review policies of venues like the Steam store for games. But those stores have seen their own share of developer complaints, and they’re specific to an audience (like gamers); here, it may be tougher for niche developers to justify. (That’s, at least, the feedback I’ve been hearing from music developers. For mainstream developers, the equation can be different.)

2.18
Apps that install kexts will be rejected

2.19
Apps that require license keys or implement their own copy protection will be rejected

2.20
Apps that present a license screen at launch will be rejected

2.21
Apps may not use update mechanisms outside of the App Store

2.7
Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them

Of course, some of the challenges of audio software are … unique. How many pro audio applications would meet the following guidelines?

6.3
Apps that do not use system provided items, such as buttons and icons, correctly and as described in the Apple Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines will be rejected

6.4
Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good it may be rejected

Comments from other developers are welcome. We’ll keep you posted.

Touch Mix is a simple music app for the iPhone and iPod touch that lets you play, mix, and remix ten exclusive tracks by producer deadmau5. Now, of course, you’re unlikely to grab this in order to DJ nothing but deadmau5. (The all-deadmau5, all-the-time approach?) But the app demonstrates that iPhone-only artist releases can be a whole lot more fun than just a few tracks and some static album artwork. And it also shows off what a handheld DJ interface could look like, with a pretty efficient one-screen-per-deck design that doesn’t overwhelm your fingertips.

Features:

• Two players, two sets of playback controls
• Interactive display warns you as the next track is queuing
• Separate crossfader, volume
• Effects: loop, filter, flange, delay
• Adjustable speed, bpm
• Scratch, back spin by touching live waveform

Yes, that’s quite a lot more than simply plopping in some static content. Just guessing, but I imagine we could see this app applied to other music, as well. (What you can’t do — yet — is bring in your own waveforms, which would make all the difference.)

Touch Mix is the work of Future Audio Workshop, the folks who brought us the lovely drag-and-drop, OpenSoundControl-compatible Circle synth. FAW’s Gavin Burke had a chat with us about how he thinks about design. (If Touch Mix isn’t meaty enough for you, you can use your iPhone or iPod touch to control Circle in real-time; you’ll find an app that works with the popular TouchOSC to ease setup.)

Touch Mix deadmau5 Edition
iTunes App Store Link

I’ve had some amazing meetings here in Berlin, with plenty to share with you over the coming weeks and months. I’m now headed to Dublin tomorrow for the amazing-looking DEAF festival. If you’re in or near Dublin, you may want to just clear the next few days for live music lineups, parties, film screenings, gallery events, and generally a dream lineup of electronic music events.

I’ll be part of a series of talks Saturday. I’ll be talking generally about how we can think about music visually, and how those visual metaphors in software impact music, with some new examples built in Processing (among examples of other work). I’m really excited about every one my fellow speakers, as well. Gavin from Future Audio Workshop (creators of Circle) will be talking about sound generally, complementing what I’m covering, and we have a number of terrific figures to chat. The film Totally Wired covers the scene around synth building and the modular renaissance as found at Schneider’s Bureau … well, you can see the lineup for yourself.

For the rest of the world not in Ireland, believe me, I’ll be sure to bring you as much back from this event as possible, even if I’m catching up through the end of 2008.

Saturday 25th October at The Digital Hub:

1.00pm – 1.40pm FAW [Future Audio Workshop]
1.40pm – 1.50pm Break
1.50pm – 2.30pm Peter Kirn [Create Digital Music]
2.30pm – 2.50pm Break
2.50pm – 4.10pm Totally Wired Film [Dir. Niamh Ahern]
4.10pm – 5.10pm Andreas Schneider [Schneider’s Bureau]
5.10pm – 5.30pm Break
5.30pm – 6.30pm Dave Vorhaus & Mark Jenkins [White Noise / BBC Radiophonic Workshop]
6.30pm – 7.00pm Break
7.00pm – 8.00pm Diffusion Concert / Soundings
8.00pm – 9.00pm Spatial Music Collective Concert

More details on Saturday’s lineup, at the DEAF Ireland Blog

DEAF live events

Here’s the trailer for “Totally Wired,” which also features a terrific original score:

Trailer for ‘Totally Wired’ from niamhahern on Vimeo.

We’ve been lucky enough to break the story of Circle, a new soft synth with a creative user interface, and to take you behind the scenes of its creators thinking process in creating the software. But maybe you don’t buy into the idea of a synth that focuses on flow and working method, or its wave morphing, modulation and effects, and quick MIDI learn features. Well, now you can give Circle a try for yourself, because it’s publicly available:

Future Audio Workshop Circle

It’s obviously something a lot of people are eagerly anticipating, because, having missed the announcement only by a day, my inbox is full of tips. (Thanks to all of you for the reminders – and seriously, don’t hesitate to nag me on a story; sometimes I get distracted!)

Normally, this is where I’d put the specs, but the specs you’ve seen before: wavetable plus analog-modeling synthesis, with lots of modulation and effects. That’s the formula we’re seeing in plenty of new synths. The difference here is an unusually clean interface with color-coded assignments and bright, friendly graphics that have been optimized to support touch should computers go that way. (Windows 7? Snow Leopard?) There’s drag-and-drop assignment, much like what I loved in Native Instruments’ Massive, but with a distinct, graphical approach here. And, incidentally, you get this graphical goodness without the latest OS – Vista and Leopard are supported, but so are XP, Tiger, and Panther. Thank cross-platform libraries in the software’s foundation – it’s the Other Platform.

The creators also tell us this release is just the beginning, with additional features in store (like OpenSoundControl support, which I’m personally eager to try out).

I’ll be playing with this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. But I’m very eager to hear your feedback – and sound designs, if you go that route.

And if anyone sees a cheap airfare from New York to Ireland, I may have to go visit FAW myself. Hmm … Farecast?

Circle from Future Audio Workshop is an upcoming virtual instrument that’s gotten our attention in a big way. In terms of sound, its capabilities are familiar, if very complete. What’s different is its approach to interface design and usability, refocusing on “Flow” and ease-of-use while looking forward to new interface capabilities in touchscreens, multi-touch, and OpenSoundControl. What makes that doubly interesting is that Circle appears to embody a trend in a new generation of music software — not that it stands alone, necessarily, as much as it seems to present a glimpse via an independent developer of where things may be going.

Eoin Rossney, our new writer and contributor to the Kore minisite, got a chance to talk to FAW co-founder Gavin Burke, a fellow Irishman. We’ll have more on the instrument itself soon, but it’s an excellent, coffee-fueled discussion of instrument design in general. -PK

I had the opportunity to visit Future Audio Workshop’s office in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland to have a chat with Gavin Burke about their upcoming synth, Circle. While instrument design is a collaborative process for FAW, Gavin’s area of expertise is in Signal Processing algorithms. I wanted to talk to FAW to find out some more about how the synth came to be, the company’s ethos, and the inclusion of OSC. What I got was a fascinating insight into the world of softsynth design and a sense that a shift may be about to occur in this area. If you haven’t heard of Circle check out CDM’s preview.

Over copious amounts of coffee, Gavin told me a little bit about how FAW came to be. Having spent a long time designing synths that strive to emulate old hardware (with many of hardware’s inherent limitations creeping across into the software effort), Gavin and the guys from FAW wanted to design a synth that does away with old conventions and embraces the type of advances in usability that we have come to take for granted in interface design over the last few years.

After giving a general rundown of the instrument (for something similar, check out Sonic State’s video from Messe), Gavin took me through some of the features that make Circle unique. The main things here are in the details. Changing a modulation amount is always a horizontal mouse movement, no matter what the current value is. The LFOs include a healthy number of wave shapes, and each can be crossfaded between two waves. Each wave is variable-phase: you just click and drag the picture of the wave horizontally to change phase. There are five modulation slots, and each can contain an LFO, a sequencer or an envelope. LFO and oscillator wave shapes are represented as simple pictures which are easy to see. And there’s no right-clicking — anywhere.

FAW say they’ve tried to create a workspace that’s simple and conducive to sound design. Gavin maintains that sound design is essentially an easy practice. Watching him quickly build presets from scratch, it’s hard to disagree. He quickly built for me a “faux beatbox,” with an LFO triggering white noise as a snare, another LFO triggering an oscillator as a kick drum, and yet another modulating the rate of a sequencer, slowing down and speeding up the sequencer’s rate organically.

This isn’t to say that Circle is short on features – there are quite a number of advanced features on offer here (hard sync on wavetable oscillators, anyone?), it’s just that anything that might obstruct or distract your workflow is neatly tidied away, or at least doesn’t jump out at you. It’s clear FAW have taken a good look at what makes interface elements work well, and they’ve taken inspiration from such sources as the iPhone and… multimeters?

Interface Design

Gavin: There is a very famous book by [Apple pioneer and founding Mac team leader] Jef Raskin called ‘The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems’. The inspiration for the color-coded connections came from Raskin’s example of how a simple device such as a multimeter has very easy-to-use, color-coded cables. He describes how all of the multimeter’s functions are different. Here you’ve got these leads: one’s red and one’s grey. That’s your positive and your negative, and when you actually have color representations of things that you can connect up, that was one of the influences for Circle.

This book just goes through all those things and tells you how to do, for example, switches properly. If you look at 99% of softsynths — if not 100% of them — at the moment they haven’t done this. The reason why people like OS X, or like using a Mac, is that it’s easy to use. You never even think about all of these things, but you find that all this talk about workflow, that’s where it comes from, from this guy. [Ed.: Some of the Mac team might well dispute that, actually, as Raskin ultimately had less of an influence on the Mac interface. But if you want some radical reading on interface design, this should absolutely be on your reading list! -PK]

There’s another guy called John Maeda and he writes a book called Simplicity — ‘The Ten Rules of Simplicity‘, and that was an influence. There were other influences, ‘The Paradox of Choice’, where the more choices you have the less likely you are to make a decision about something. We took that to the level of the interface, where… if you’ve five different note-stealing algorithms, you don’t need them. You’ll only ever use one, so why have you got five? It’s like when you get a Swiss Army knife – you only ever use the knife, but it’s got a magnifying glass, a spoon, maybe three different types of bottle openers, and when you want to use the knife all these other things get in your way. We still have all the bits and pieces, but we’ve just put them down on the bottom panel or moved them out of the way so that they don’t get in the way of the basic thing, which is the sound design.

The Beginnings of FAW, and Future Frameworks

Gavin: So these were the things we were thinking about when we were starting, and we went to the guys in Germany [Christophe and Johannes] and they were also influenced by the same stuff like Maeda and Raskin. We got in contact with them, went over to Germany, spent two days with them and went for a few drinks and said we’d start up the company — the four of us just got together and did all the bits and pieces. Pierre and I moved to Ireland about a year ago and we started coding, and we had all the ideas drawn on a sheet of paper and had a think about the workflows. Then we started putting it together, and as we found that if something wasn’t working as imagined [in the workflow], we could make a change very easily.

Pierre and I were actually users as well as designing and coding [Circle] at the same time. So if we wanted to change something, we didn’t have to go through that big mechanism of making change orders and someone signing off on them. I could just say across the room, “Pierre, I don’t like this, can you change it?”

The main idea is just, you know, you’re on a computer. Why would you have a hardware panel with cables everywhere or right-clicks, all that kind of stuff? Why not show the LFO, why not put a dot on the envelope so you can see it? You know, let people see what’s actually happening rather than everything always being hidden behind the scenes. Then modulation is no longer this kind of thing that’s just ‘LFO 1 Amt’, you can actually see that the LFO’s moving.

When you can see everything on the interface, it means that you know all your options, you know what you can connect to what, and you can have ideas you wouldn’t normally have. That was another thing; keep it all on one panel. Then put the more complicated stuff down on the bottom. The other thing is to keep all the modules in drop menus as single clicks, so hopefully if there’s a touch screen around at some time, everything can be done in a very easy way.

And you start to get into it. That’s the whole idea of Flow. If you have an idea it’s very easy: you just grab the circle and drop it, rather than right-clicking and flicking between pages and that kind of thing. You’ll see some synthesizers have these modulation matrices with cryptic names like ‘KF2 to F1 in Trig.’ There should be no reason why anybody would do that in the first place. I can’t understand it. I think a lot of it has to do with the graphics frameworks, that the graphics just couldn’t do those kind of things, but now they’ve evolved to a stage where you can, and we’re taking advantage of that.

Eoin: And do you think that’s an advantage of the frameworks themselves — the languages that you’re building the software with?

Gavin: Yeah.

Eoin: Or is it that the hardware has come of age?

Gavin: It’s a bit of everything, really. If you look at a lot of the companies that started ten years ago, they’re still using all their legacy graphics frameworks, and they haven’t been thinking about all these things. We wanted to correct that a bit with what we’re doing and still be able to do sound design, because sound design isn’t complicated. It’s just that the way it’s presented makes it complicated, so we want to make it easier.

Eoin: I can’t take my eyes off that LFO…

Gavin - [laughs] Yeah, it’s hypnotizing.

Eoin: But that’s the thing about it is, it’s an engaging interface. Looking at it you just want to go in and grab it and –

Gavin: – start doing the bits and pieces. Even MIDI Learn, you know — the majority of software synthesizers at the moment, if you want to learn a control you have to go Ctrl/right-click, click through a menu, click Learn, then go over here and move that, then go back out of the learn mode. We just said — [clicks the MIDI learn button, which like Ableton Live takes just one click] — like that. That’s the way it should be, then you just turn it off again.

Extensibility & Agile Programming

Gavin - For us, because we’re using Agile development, it’s very easy for us to be responsive and to get stuff done. We don’t have to check with ten people first before we can do something. We’re [talking about] adding to Circle [over time]. So we’re maybe going to do some nice, fancy FM oscillators, and as we get feedback from people, we can make changes. During beta testing, someone wanted OSC control over the individual steps in the sequencer and to be able to use MIDI Learn with them.

Eoin: And when you talk about Agile programming, can you describe what you mean for people who aren’t familiar with it?

Gavin: It’s just a set of rules for programming. It’s quite popular at the moment, and it’s starting to gather steam. It means that people like myself, Pierre and the two guys in Germany, Kristoff and Johanne, we could do something equivalent to what a big company could just by… not having the big company there! You can actually do more. It’s not just in audio software. It’s in loads of different fields where you’ve got small groups of people who are very dedicated. With the Internet and communication, people like us can get together and start to give the big companies a run for their money in terms of features and what we can do. So that’s very interesting, and when you apply the Agile rules and whatever it starts to work.

Eoin: I saw on the website that JUCE is the platform you’re running on. [Ed.: JUCE is a C++-based class library for cross-platform audio and graphics.] What’s that about?

Gavin: JUCE is a set of controls, that’s all it is. It’s all these sliders and stuff. [He demonstrates using the mouse to program OSC program as an example.] So what Pierre uses JUCE for is he can then position knobs on the screen. There isn’t an actual editor where you can drag and drop, you have to code it in, but it’s [easy to add] a knob or panel [in code]. It just allows us to do a lot of these things, to draw a line like that (using filter indicator line as an example).

Eoin: It lets you do your job more easily?

Gavin: Exactly. All the graphics are done in Photoshop, and it also lets us do stuff like fading. We’re using vector graphics and transparency layers and [JUCE's timing features].

Eoin: So this functionality is all built into JUCE?

Gavin: Yeah, and you can do any type of program with it. There are a number of developers using this framework.

Eoin: The fact that it’s mentioned on your website, that kind of caught my eye because people don’t normally say what tools they’re using.

Gavin: Yeah, and we’ve a lot of respect for Jules [JUCE's developer], because he’s on his forum there and he maybe has, you know, 200 people there asking him questions at the same time and he’s never short with anybody.

OpenSoundControl

Gavin: We’re always thinking about what we’d like for ourselves, and personally I’ve always wanted [OSC support; see opensoundcontrol.org for more on this control protocol]. I was using this Mouse-to-OSC to test, and I was just getting the idea that it would be cool to have a single interface controlling Circles on different channels. If you want to control different plug-ins on different channels inside a host, it’s a bit complicated for the general user.

I can do it here now, I can add another Circle. Now we’ve got two Circles. But rather than having these two screens open and maybe a third one — so you’ve got three big screens open at the same time — you’ve just one screen. And you’ve got these controls assigned to the most interesting stuff on each of the synthesizers [via OSC assignments].

You’re not trying to think about MIDI and what MIDI channels you’re on and all that kind of stuff; it just keeps it nice and simple. [OSC] is where it’s heading. It’s where most people want to be; most people don’t want to [have to do MIDI mappings]. The Novation [ReMOTE SL's Automap feature] isn’t too bad, but it’s still not that easy.

Eoin:It’s something we’re interested in, because there hasn’t been a massive adoption of OSC.

Gavin: We put in OSC with the view that, once it’s in there, we can develop it more, add transmit [capability] and also be able to have the interface so that, let’s say, if you move something on the interface that it also updates on the Lemur [multi-touch controller hardware]. It’s just to keep things open.

That’s the main idea, really: to keep everything open and easy, to avoid getting crazy with the options.

Back to Basics

Gavin: If you look at the Maeda laws of simplicity, one of the laws is, do you really need it? And if you don’t really need it then don’t put it in there just because you can. I think a lot of other companies use the spec sheet. It’s like the bigger the spec sheet the better it is, but I think that just makes the thing more difficult, more complicated and more trouble, really. You know, if you’ve got a big massive spec sheet and they haven’t even bothered to do a proper MIDI learn, it’s a bit ridiculous. And they forget about the simple stuff, and for us using the software we want that stuff. We take it for granted that we’re going to have a hundred wavetables and it’s going to do oscillator hard sync.

Eoin: You don’t want it to be shouting it out from the interface.

Gavin: No, no. Because that’s not what you want to know about when you’re using it. You want to be into the circles and stay away from the big long spec sheets and five note-stealing algorithms and modulating the modulation with the modulation.

Eoin: That’s basically what you’re selling, then, is workflow. That’s your edge: you’re coming at it from a usability point of view.

Gavin: Yeah, we’ve done everything else. All the stuff that everybody else does, it does, as well. We do everything that everybody else does in terms of the sound, if not more. We have the width on the triangle oscillator there, small things like that. But the most important thing for us is to make it easy, and when you’re actually using it, it’s not the spec sheet, it’s the actual playing of [the instrument]. Adding features to get a big spec sheet doesn’t affect the end user, because it’s getting back to that thing about the Paradox of Choice. What we’re doing is concentrating on what we want ourselves, and whatever comes out of it in the workflow.

And the sound is good. We’re very happy with it, and we’ve put a lot of work into it.

Eoin: So, what’s down the road, looking at the future of the tool?

Gavin: We’re going to have a look at the iPhone SDK and see is there anything interesting in there, because that’s the next big thing. I’m not sure whether you could do a professional product on the iPhone but even for ourselves to do something cool, to give it a go.

We’re going to start using computers in a different way. There’s a bit of that in there with Circle, looking forward to the touchscreen [as an interface]. I think those things are going to change — usability, the things you get with Windows. I can’t use Windows anymore; it just drives me crazy.

Eoin: I have to say — and this isn’t trying to pay you a false compliment, but it does genuinely seem like a bit of a revolution in terms of the way that we think about music software design, that things are starting to change. The way we use things is changing, and one of the reasons I was interested is you guys seem to be forging ahead with that.

Gavin: We’re very interested in usability. I think it’s because I’m getting older <laughs>. My father, he’s 72, and he finds it hard to use the remote control for the television. After a while you get tired — not of learning new things, but putting up with things that should be fixed. You just want to make life easier for yourself when you’re using stuff. You don’t want to have to be getting involved in complicated things when you’re trying to do your music.

Circle is one of the most ambitious soft synth designs I’ve seen yet. Its core features read like a wish list for what a modern soft synth would do:

• On-screen routing designed for the computer screen, with color-coded circles, drag-and-drop, previews — and no silly virtual cables. (Sorry, Propellerhead.)
• OpenSoundControl support for the Monome, Lemur, Wacom tablets, whatever you’ve got — along wih easy MIDI learn.
• “Live performance”-optimized UI — actually very much a kindrid spirit with tools like Ableton Live or FL Studio in design aesthetic, workflow, and accessibility, but in a synth — just the thing if you’ve felt a gap between the sequencing workflow and the synth / sound design working method. And you can even swap presets with an Apple Remote if you’ve got one.
• Easy sound design (more on this soon)

The sound engine itself is a good survey of the kind of tools you might want, with a mix of analog- and digital-style waveforms and modulation, but plenty of oddball wave shapes and modulation and effects thrown in, too.

What I like best about developer Future Audio Workshop’s approach: rather than be the most powerful or the most sonically unusual or the most feature-laden instrument, they want you to achieve a sense of creative “flow.”

But I really can’t talk about the instrument very well as a result — have a look at the demo videos, and I think you’ll be as intrigued as I am. (I’ve been working a little bit with an early build, and really like it a lot.)

Future Audio Workshop (skip to the videos, really)

Mac / Windows (Intel, Vista, AU, VST, RTAS)

Pricing TBD (but expecting a fairly reasonable price point); available soon

Stay tuned, as I’ll be making some music with this software over the coming days and want to report back in more detail — particularly when it comes to evolving OSC connectivity for hardware like the Monome (and software connectivity, too, naturally — would be great to couple this with Reaktor, for instance).

If you’re at Musikmesse in Frankfurt, stop by and say hi to the developers. They’re also keeping a Flickr stream of the new goodies at the show — not just theirs. Hope they’re able to break away from the booth and look around.