Ugh... AudioUnits Give Me Headaches...

So, here I am in Phoenix, and we have a report of an issue with Replicant and Numerology 2. No big deal, really, but I have some down time, and I thought I’d take a quick gander and see what’s what.

So, I download and install Numerology 2, whereupon I discover that the only AU synth I have on this laptop is Massive. Why I installed it I can’t remember, but it is kind of a drag because, well, it is rather massive. (I don’t normally use this or any laptop for anything approaching music, and since music is work for me, when I’m on vacation I don’t make any; thus I don’t need a whole passel of software on this machine.)

I thought to myself “hey, self, why don’t we just go grab a freebie drum synth of some sort and we’ll have a little fun with Numerology or whatever.” This turns out to be essentially impossible. My choices are (a) nothing, (b) downloading and installing Kontakt 3 on this machine and then finding some samples, or (c) something tedious, I’m sure, like creating a drum synth in Bidule or something equally ridiculous.

So, AU users. WTF? Is there not a single free AU drum machine out there, worth a shit or otherwise? Being largely a Windows VST user, I can, of course, find stacks and stacks of free plugins for most any task. About 98.4% of them are utter crap, because you get what you pay for, usually, but they’re there if I need them. Apparently the same is not true in the hippy, trippy land of AU.

Oh, Happy Holidays to the Americans now, too.