There’s an interesting post here from a fellow plug-in developer who thinks about as highly as I do of AudioUnits. Actually I suppose it’s overstating the point to say that this fellow hates AudioUnits. He just spent three months trying to write the silly things and ended up with no usable results and the opinion that Apple’s support for developers of AudioUnits, and the code they provide for developing AudioUnits, is so half-assed that there’s no business sense in continuing the attempt to write AudioUnits.
The reactions voiced on the thread are interesting. This guy’s products are considered among the best in the ProTools community. A few people mentioned being disconcerted by his announcement because they had abandoned ProTools in favor of Apple’s competing product. As far as I’m concerned, making that decision like jumping off the Titanic into a leaky life boat that’s already half sunk, but I guess Apple’s marketing is still pretty persuasive.
The flip side, of course, is that Audio Damage also burned about three months of development time on our first attempt to port to AU and ended up with nothing. That was fairly early in the history of AU, when things were just a laughable mess. Our second attempt was more fruitful and now we ship AU versions of all of our products. However, I won’t say that this guy’s bad impression of the AU development world is inflated or inaccurate. I’ll also say that we’ve received an awful lot of reports of random, unreproduceable problems with AU plug-ins ever since Logic 8 and OS 10.5 came out. Like I said, it’s like a leaky life boat.
