Some fair points regarding the still-in-progress evolution of full screen apps and their use on dual monitor Macs in Mountain Lion:
“No one said this stuff is easy”
Indeed, but maybe a Settings preference for this would be welcome, rather than just assuming everyone is on a single-screen laptop. I’d love to be able to show quicktime full screen on one monitor, while grading projects on the other screen – it’s possible with Quick Look so why not make that the universal behavior?
Remember, the big news is the Rack Extensions. It’s the only way forward on future platforms like iOS. Even with cross-app audio APIs, providing curated plugins (rather than manually added ones) seems to be the ideal way to provide add-ons for your audio software in the new sandboxed era of computing.
Who else is ready?
Ableton: Max for Live could conceivably become their version of an “internal” add-on store.
FL Studio: Synthmaker patches could serve this purpose as well.
Logic: Apple can use the architecture from GarageBand lessons to provide add-ons within the app (you could say the “jam packs” are a precedent as well).
Pro Tools: *cricket, cricket*
Skate to where the puck is headed, audio companies. With Microsoft sandboxing Metro, and Apple becoming the GateKeeper, there’s no question that external add-ons are on the way out.
Here’s an interesting tidbit buried among all the other Apple news: Apple bought a small Italian plugin company.
I feel like I used AutoSampler at one point:
AutoSampler has been designed to be as simple as possible to operate. For sampling an hardware instrument, you just need to connect it to your Mac through MIDI and audio cables. The MIDI synth is sent a sequence of notes at various pitches and velocities and each sample is recorded, trimmed, normalized, saved and automatically inserted at the appropriate place in newly created instruments.
Pretty cool – I’d like to see this baked into future editions of Logic, for sure. But why acquire this company with expertise in sampling-based plugins? Surely Logic’s engineers could do this on their own. And Garageband’s sampler is…
…only on iOS. Here’s another Redmatica product: GBSamplerManager
Use your EXS24 instruments in your GarageBand for iPad songs
There are literally tens of thousands of commercial and freely available EXS24 sounds available on the internet. Drum loops, vintage analog synths, everything. With GBSamplerManager you can easily use them in your GarageBand iOS projects. And if you want to migrate your hardware and software synth sounds to GarageBand iOS you can purchase the simple one-click AutoSampler application on your Mac to create your own sampled sound library.
So, if we’re almost a year from the last major GarageBand release, and we’re just now buying a highly relevant company whose products could be baked into the next GarageBand, AND their products are highly relevant to the probably more popular iOS GarageBand, then either:
A) Apple already copied Redmatica’s core apps and they’re being swell and offering them jobs because their products will likely no longer be relevant. Expect a big release soon with all of the cool sampling features.
Or
B) There isn’t going to be a major GarageBand release until at least 6-8 months from now, giving them time to implement Redmatica’s software. Expect a big release in 8-12 months.
Either way, this acquisition tells me that Apple is serious about improving the state of affairs on Mac GarageBand, which is a good thing for everyone – if Apple is trying to improve their audio products, the OS is going to stay ahead of the game as well.
Look at the features page. More proof of the trend I’m predicting toward unified editing.