One thing that has always been a point of mine is to move the UI design of our products away from PNG-flipping (called "filmstrips" in the music software UI business) and Photoshop asset farming and in to the purely procedural world. This first fascinated me some time ago. I believe the original Kombinat was the first product we had that had procedural controls, and once that was released, I generally moved to a scenario where the background and some buttons of the interface were image assets, but the knobs and meters were, in general, pure math.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, drawing something procedurally means doing it with math and drawing commands, on the fly, instead of...

Back in late December, we released a firmware update for Sequencer 1, version 1.5.0. This was the eighth update in the last couple of years, and while it wasn't the most exciting update we've put out, a behind-the-scenes look will show some of the thought processes that go into these updates. Firmware updates for the sequencer generally fall into two categories: big updates that contain exciting new features, and small updates which mostly fix bugs. We try to always add some small new feature to the latter sort. We figure that if you're going to go to the length of unracking your sequencer to update its firmware, it's far more fun if you get something new (even a small something)...

When we started Audio Damage in 2002, plugin companies that didn't sell boxed software in Guitar Center were a rare thing. (In point of fact, our very first product, Mayhem, was shipped as a CD-ROM.) Our needs were rather odd for the time, and nobody provided a turnkey solution for selling digital content online, so my wife Elle wrote one. Over the years, this custom store has been heavily updated and frequently modified to meet the ever-changing needs of the Audio Damage customer base. However, in recent months, it has become apparent that our futuristic license control mechanism and streamlined retail engine has been becoming steadily obsolete as web technology has moved in to its current state. The final straw was when Paypal...