Five Years, What A Surprise...

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there…
-David Bowie, “Five Years”

Last week was Audio Damage’s fifth anniversary. In that time we’ve released 21 plugins (counting three different versions of Discord), dealt with the abject stupidity of Digidesign, the flighty schizophrenia of Apple, and the bovine stalwartness of Microsoft. We’ve made plugins for XP, Vista, OS9, OSX 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, and soon 10.6. We’ve made VST2.3 and VST2.4 plugins with VSTGUI 2.3, 2.4, 3.0, and 3.5, along with RTAS for OS9 (briefly), AU for 10.2, AU for 10.3, and AU for 10.4 and onwards, in three distinctly different versions of Xcode, CodeWarrior, and two more-or-less the same versions of Visual Studio. Some time in the immediate future, we’ll have to man up and make VST3 plugins, too.

To make those 21 products, I’ve personally made about 100 nearly complete user interfaces, and spent a sum total of what has to be many months, if not years, staring at Photoshop CS and 3D Studio Max. Adam has coded well over 200 individual DSP blocks, along with a couple dozen user interface objects and a complete parameter management system, among many other important things you don’t see, but make plugins work. We’ve put up with documentation (or the lack thereof) that is truly awful, from companies that should know better. We’ve seen at least three plug-in formats that we know of either come and go, or never get out of the starting gates. I assume there are more that we don’t know about.

We’ve thrown a few elbows in the industry, made a lot of friends, bought a bunch of ads, faced some fairly intense competition, bitched and moaned about inconsequential shit, and dealt with shit that isn’t inconsequential at all. We’ve moved the corporation from one state to another and moved my actual ass to a different state entirely. We’ve put up with rampant idiocy from people that style themselves members of the creative community but are actually members of some kind of bullshit that doesn’t have a name.

We’ve also met a metric shitload of extremely cool people, made what we think are some pretty good plug-ins, and had a lot of laughs. This business fucking rocks, no doubt about it, and you’d have a hard time getting me to go hunting for a new job. Adam and I would like to thank each and every person that has supported our little company through its birthing pains. The road is wide open from here, and here’s to hoping for a 10 year anniversary post in 2014.