Post
by Crandall1 » Wed Mar 05, 2008 8:03 am
For what it's worth, I absolutely understand Steven's decision. We've experienced ongoing issues with AU since the day we decided to release in that format. Everything he says in his initial GS post is absolutely true. What he _didn't_ discover, because he didn't have to live through Apple's incessant revving, is how often they break everything, and for that he should be truly thankful.
Now, that said, there are some misconceptions voiced in the thread that I think should be addressed. The most common one is that VST is a bigger market than AU. This is untrue; while there are more VST users, most of them rely on free plugins (of which there are far more on VST PC side, obviously.) The actual split in paying customers, in our experience, is about 50/50 AU to VST.
Another common misconception is that AU is "better" in some way than VST. If you're a cross-platform developer this is moot, as you would have to fork your code to take advantage of anything else AU had to offer. This is, of course, stupid.
The key thing to understand is that, as a small indie developer, you make your money releasing new products. If I was forced to give an estimate, I'd say that we spend about 6 months of every year doing R&D, and the other 6 months either porting to AU or trying to figure out why AU is broken (again.) If we didn't have to spend half our time, and I'm not exaggerating that in the slightest, dealing with AU, we would logically release more or better (or both) plugins. This is a simple fact of resource allocation, and not the result of preferring one platform over another.
But it comes to this: the reason we're able to release AU at all is that we've been doing it since the AU kit was stable (and what a laughable term that is in this context) and have been able to roll with the punches. Someone jumping in to AU now (e.g. Steven) simply isn't going to have the knowledge base to deal with the different compiler settings (and even which version of Xcode you have to use) to build a UB AU that will absolutely work in Logic, DP, and Live. This information isn't written down anywhere, to the best of my knowledge. The people at Apple that are supposed to answer questions of this sort very rarely do, and the documentation might as well be written for something else entirely, because it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is actually included in the kit.
Now, all that said, one could say "well, Developer X cowboy'd up and did it. Why can't you?" In fact, several did. But the simple fact is that in a situation like Steven's (which I thoroughly understand, for obvious reasons) it is incredibly difficult to see why it is worth the trouble. And believe me when I say that it is a _lot_ of trouble. This business isn't lucrative enough to be worth doing if you're not having a good time, and if Steven enjoys doing PT plugs and hates doing AU, and he can already pay his rent, then I say "good show" and leave it at that. Complaining that he doesn't release AU is like complaining that you can't play CDs in your 8 track deck. You bought the fucking thing with knowledge aforethought, right? Go get a CD player.
