Developer Gives His Reasoning for No AAX-DSP

[Steamy Williams]

Originally Posted by quintosardo

- Do you think it could sound interesting, generally speaking?

- Do you think it could sound interesting with us?

To answer your questions... yes and yes.

[Oblivion777]

Agreed. I don't think HDX is a "small" market. Sure it's smaller than Native, but it's not small. Just my guess; I cannot prove the statement to be true.

[Wall2Wall]

AAX-DSP is tiny. Mostly Dub Stages/Post Houses. I recently completed a soundtrack and we had sessions in well known music-only facilities in LA, Chicago, NYC, Miami, Atlanta, and Toronto. TDM/HD 9-10 still rules. It basically comes down to missing tools. Especially Waves and Auto-Tune while tracking. I thought Jungle City in NYC had everything. And they do. Just no HDX. TDM all the way.

Couple that with the smaller studios and one man operations not budging off TDM and you have a "tiny" market. Not the first developer to mention that. My guess is the UAD-2 market is much larger. Those cards are every studio I've been in since their release.

[propower]

If it is tiny (as I suspect you are correct) its AVIDs fault!

5 years of bad decisions. They OWNED the dsp market no discussion 5 years ago. They could have introduced their own Apollo long ago and owned that market too (it was UAD that was tiny then!). And then HDX - all they needed was a software bridge or the inclusion of the ability to run the 32 bit legacy stuff and it would have been WAY more successful. Obsoleting the tools that professionals count on in an evolutionary product (HDX) was and is crazy talk!

All my opinion of course.

[Keith Moore]

Originally Posted by quintosardo

Hi all!

My name is Quinto, I'm currently porting our plugins (SKnote) to AAX native (at last!).

I'm writing here because I had a talk about AAX-DSP by email with a user, he was asking me if we planned AAX-DSP and I answered "no, too hard for us".

He asked me about possible crowd-funded development. Uhm... may be worth it and give us the strength for this step.

- Do you think it could sound interesting, generally speaking?

- Do you think it could sound interesting with us?

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

It would actually be much easier to start that way. From what I understood, if you coded your DSP first, then you could just compile it for Native AAX and it would work. Then you would simply have to use a AU or VST compiler to compile the Native AAX version of the plugin into the other formats.



That as not a limitation imposed by Avid, but a omission. Once they were told so Avid made the necessary changes so that more plugins could be instantiated per chip. Even with UAD and other dsp system, your plugins are not sepated in half or three pieces over three different chip. That would actually slow down the processing speed. Hyper-threading, which is what you are relating to, is not necessarily faster.



As far as I know, they took full advantage of the sdk and the programers kitchen that Avid had (still has?) going where the developers could meet with Avid to talk about their plugins and get over hurdles directly at the source of the programing team



I hear you there, so would I.




At the last moderator talk with Avid, I had suggested that Avid either provide some monetary incentive from the sales of HDX system to the plugin makers, or offers a programmer service where a pluging maker could exchange Avid's programmer's time for a % of the sale of their plugins, in this way the programmer of Avid would be the one doing the port for a certain % leaving the time for the programmers of the plugin company to work on new stuff.

Hey Quinto,

I'd read up on these posts from Emcha_audio. Especially this last paragraph, could be another route to get your products into AAX-DSP with less hassle on your end. Allows you to develop more and code less.

Most significant part I caught from his post was regarding the coding order, if true then developing AAX-DSP first will allow easier porting to AAX-Native/RTAS/AU/VST versions. More difficult the other way around.

I'd also say maybe reach out to Brainrox on Gearslutz, maybe he'd be willing to share some insight regarding the AAX-DSP coding aspect. You can find him at the link below.

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/11309568-post88.html

[quintosardo]

I think it is being thought of as more complicated than it actually is.

Writing to a new system is not hard. For example we decided to develop our AVE "500 format" hardware module. It applies pitch shifting so we had to include a digital part. It meant choosing a system and writing for it from scratch. I simply did it. Assembly code.

Writing for AAX-DSP is a similar experience, just the core needs to be written for the DSP.

Porting to AAX would have been the same thing as including the new DSP in our hardware, or something similar.

Was the new DSP in our hw a smart move? I think it was, now we can include whatever digital and offer the product to the whole audio world. And it is creative, so it has a meaning on its own (even if it didn't generate incomes).

Would AAX-DSP make sense for us? Not sure. It is like going inside a closed world. It is not something creative, it is just selling something more.

What about dedicating these efforts to develop our own DSP system?

-----

Avid is quite supportive, they offer special pricing on hardware and software is provided for free. We have the next ProTools install you not even know of (and signed an agreement).

So, it is not about having enough resources, it is about it having a meaning. Is allocating our extremely thin spread resources to this the best way to go? I think it isn't, on an economical perspective, but it could be an interesting niche and generate some steady work, also it could be a plus for our image, being it mainly aimed to a professional world.

This is my sincere and unexperienced view on it, I hope it doesn't sound bad, just trying to describe it.

[audioluche]

Originally Posted by quintosardo

Hi all!

My name is Quinto, I'm currently porting our plugins (SKnote) to AAX native (at last!).

I'm writing here because I had a talk about AAX-DSP by email with a user, he was asking me if we planned AAX-DSP and I answered "no, too hard for us".

He asked me about possible crowd-funded development. Uhm... may be worth it and give us the strength for this step.

- Do you think it could sound interesting, generally speaking?

- Do you think it could sound interesting with us?

Yes and yes.
HDX is a verry powerfull system. Would not chage it for anything else. I, for sure, prefer to give my money to developpera who support AAX DSP. For the others, their products have to be veeeerrrrry strong to make me open my wallet.

[Oblivion777]

109,99% agree with the post above.

[quintosardo]

While working at AAX native I studied all the docs about AAX-DSP and I think I have a good informed perspective on it, now.

I'd like to submit an idea to a general AAX-DSP users poll.

- We define a bundle of our plugins, e.g. the main compressors and two unique ones (SoundBrigade and the upcoming BlowIR, a special way of adding ambience). This is the first set to be ported to DSP. The set can be redefined depending on feedback, of course.
- Launch a crowd-funded project, with a contributor's special bundle offered at say 300$
- Set a threshold similar to 30.000$, 100 supporters.
- Start development on monday.

I know these are ridiculously low figures but we would get the huge advantage of having crossed the line.

Do you think something like this may happen?

[Emcha_audio]

Actually not so rediculous. As I replied to your PM, start by making your framework and your goals, then the reward. Post it on a crowd funding website, you might even generate interest from people outside of the pro audio community.

Secondly, there's over 15000 system sold out there. And as you know each system needs it's own license, so if you're product is solid, fills a need and is great sounding, that's a minimum of 15000 possible sales. Yes HDX is smaller than TDM, but the market keeps growing as people keeps buying cards. TDM reached it's cap after 15 years of being sold on the market and that's only for TDM since there were MIX system before that and others that paved the way, HDX while having a slower growth since the demand is not necessarily as needed as TDM was 15-20 years ago. You still could have an hefty profit. And as stated, since you are already starting with the right writing framework (writing your plugin as if you were already writing it as dsp) then you should not have too many problems hopefully.