The Updates Will Continue Until Morale Improves...

As you've no doubt noticed if you're a long-time customer, we've done quite a few updates, both to the website and to our product line, in the last few months. Our last round of major updates took place during the pandemic, and didn't touch every product; we thought it was high time we tamed this sprawl and brought everything up to modern standards.

Obviously, Continua and Quanta, being our marquee products, got a lot of attention lavished on them, and we're not done yet. Quanta 2's newest update added real-time recording and a whole mess of filter modes. We're going to attempt to (gingerly) put those same filter modes into Continua soon, and we have a couple more ideas for dope oscillator modes we're going to explore.

Everything is getting our current omnibus preset manager, which has a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements. You will note, for instance, that all the recently updated plugins populate the host's preset menu with the contents of our folders. Additionally, you can now drag-and-drop presets and folders within the window, in order to reorganize things. We're going to add dedicated "New Folder" and "Init Preset" buttons this month; you'll see those rolling out soon.

Some of the very oldest products were in dire need of refreshes, and those are being addressed one at a time. We add modern features where appropriate. We had a good chuckle while updating Dubstation last month, because many of the things we added as an afterthought in that update hadn't been invented yet when it initially shipped in 2005.

This is some inside info you might not find interesting, but we have fully modernized our build scripts now; it used to take a full day to do a single product's customer-facing builds, but after a year of script-tuning (and, for what it's worth, a decade or two of Moore's Law having its way with computers), we've got that down to about 15 minutes. What this means is that updates are much, much easier to do, and we're far more likely to fix minor problems rather than letting them stack up for years. If a product has already been fully updated to the modern system (about half of them have so far), the trigger for a fix-and-rebuild is far lower than it has ever been in the history of the company.

Part and parcel of that is our installer, which is now at v1.3 and is something we're very happy with. You will note that v1.3 installers (you'll have seen them in Traverse, in the recent Quanta 2 update, and in this week's Filterstation 2 update) have a settings panel where you can set the target folders for each format. This will persist through all AD installers (including older ones that don't have the settings feature). It defaults to our usual locations, but if you're the type who likes to put their plugins elsewhere, well, now you can.

The website got a major overhaul; we were finally able to vastly improve the downloads. Due to the nature of Shopify's customer accounts, they are still listed by order rather than by product; we're working on a way around that. (As a digital goods company with dozens of multi-platform products in the catalog, we are an edge case as far as Shopify stores go.) But it is, we feel, vastly improved over the previous method, with a proper locker now, and the ability to redeem codes from Plugin Boutique and other retailers, rather than relying on them for updates. We are pondering an omnibus download app, as it appears we now have that ability with the new code system, but we're of two minds there. If you have a particular preference or idea in that regard, feel free to reach out to us.

What's in store? We're going to proceed at the current tempo; updates to older products will proceed at a pace of two to three a month, and we're going to continue putting out smaller and more experimental products while that's occurring, until everything is lined up for what feels like the first time in Audio Damage's 24-year history. If there is a small feature in one of the products we haven't got to yet that you'd like to see, or something about the website that irks you, now is the time to let us know.

-Chris Randall
-Bellows Falls, VT