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.