Full usability on MacOS

The path to 1.0

Anukari 1.0 is out. Reflections on three years of full-time work, from leaving Google and a broken shoulder to first sound and full polyphony.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2026

devlog

Some fun stories about Meebo

Stories from my Meebo years, including the HR outage that made Trampoline Enthusiast my official job title and the great finger rocket wars.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2026

devlog

Introducing the FX Object

The new FX object puts 27 effects like reverb and vocoder in the 3D scene, instanced per voice so the FX chain can feed back into the physics.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2026

devlog

Cranking out more UX improvements

Claude handles the incidental complexity now, so I cleared a pile of long-stalled UX tasks like parameter smoothing, plus thoughts on coding with AI.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2026

Devlog

Rewriting the 3D graphics engine (again)

Why I replaced Google Filament with 40K lines of custom PBR engine code, written with Claude in weeks, that survives VK_DEVICE_LOST without crashing.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2026

Devlog

VFX shaders and screen recording

Release 0.9.30 adds post-processing shaders and 1-click screen recording. The recorder alone is 6,500 lines of platform-specific C++, built with Claude.

Evan Mezeske

Mar 2026

Devlog

RAM savings in the 0.9.26 release

How 0.9.26 cuts Anukari's RAM use. A lock-free background allocator with epoch-based freeing replaces 154 MB of preallocated delay line buffers.

Evan Mezeske

Mar 2026

Devlog

Abandoning resend.com for email

Resend's global suppression list was silently eating my customers' license key emails, so I migrated anukari.com to Postmark for deliverability.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2026

Devlog

A wild MTS-ESP support appears

MTS-ESP microtuning support landed in an afternoon, alongside NAMM followups, an AU validation hang fix, and a Filament reflections crash on AMD.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2026

Devlog

NAMM stories: The Julius O. Smith III votive candle

A custom votive candle of DSP legend Julius O. Smith III led to meeting Nicholas Porcaro and Pat Scandalis at the Anukari NAMM booth.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2026

Devlog

Audio quality improvements

I replaced the crackling JUCE limiter with a hard limit at +6 dBFS and re-leveled all 200+ factory presets to -15 LUFS for far more dynamic range.

Evan Mezeske

Dec 2025

Devlog

This website is now on Google Cloud

After Railway's software audit policy and Northflank's broken 503-throwing proxy, anukari.com now runs on Cloud Run behind a global load balancer.

Evan Mezeske

Dec 2025

Devlog

Railway.com knows better than you

Railway blocked my emergency deploy over dependency CVEs already live in prod, and why piling on safety checks eventually causes the outage.

Evan Mezeske

Dec 2025

Devlog

Anukari on the CPU (part 3: in retrospect)

Looking back at the GPU years, where my 50,000-object goal led me astray, and why one SIMD backend beats maintaining CUDA, Metal, and OpenCL.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2025

Devlog

Anukari on the CPU (part 2: CPU optimization)

Part 2 of the CPU rewrite, from spot-vectorizing float3 math with SSE and NEON intrinsics to restructuring loops for compiler auto-vectorization.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2025

Devlog

Anukari on the CPU (part 1: GPU issues)

Anukari now runs on the CPU with hand-coded SIMD instead of the GPU. Part 1 explains the GPU origin story and the naive port that was only 5x slower.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2025

Devlog

Finally Anukari has macros, and a preset API

Eight mappable macro knobs land in the UI with drag-and-drop modulation binding, plus 312ears built a Python preset API from my protobuf definitions.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2025

Devlog

Working better on some Radeon chips

The Radeon gfx90c driver aborts in clBuildProgram because it can't index kernel argument arrays dynamically. Moving them to constant memory fixed it.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2025

Devlog

Multichannel, ASIO, Radeon, and randomization

Multichannel 50x50 audio I/O with near-zero overhead, ASIO support on Windows, and a workaround for a Radeon clBuildProgram crash on gfx90c.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2025

Devlog

Huge macOS performance improvements

With Apple's help I cut Metal kernel launch overhead under 50us using MTLSharedEvent and double-buffered encoding, then had to unbreak CUDA.

Evan Mezeske

May 2025

Devlog

Apple performance progress

Applying Apple's NDA guidance to the GPU spin loop, serializing its kernels with MTLEvent, and deduplicating it across processes via shared memory.

Evan Mezeske

May 2025

Devlog

Had a super productive conversation with an Apple Metal engineer

My Appeal to Apple post worked. I got a call with a Metal engineer, performance hints I can use now, and an open line to the right people at Apple.

Evan Mezeske

May 2025

Devlog

An Appeal to Apple from Anukari

macOS GPU clock heuristics don't recognize real-time audio work, and my spin loop workaround fails on Pro and Max chips. I need the Metal team's help.

Evan Mezeske

May 2025

Devlog

Demo mode, first-launch flow, and more

Demo mode now ducks the output gain instead of blasting white noise, plus a first-launch flow with a skin picker and a near-instant preset chooser.

Evan Mezeske

Apr 2025

Devlog

Preparing for the open (paid) Beta

With 85 factory presets and a preset maker contracted, I'm prepping the first public release. Payments will go through Shopify, app store gripes included.

Evan Mezeske

Mar 2025

Devlog

The AAX plugin is working

Porting Anukari to AAX went smoothly aside from the iLok and PACE signing dance, and Pro Tools flushed out bugs that also affected VST3 and AU.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2025

Devlog

Getting more and more stable

An undocumented Metal error 14 with multiple plugin instances traced to kernels clearing 300 MB delay buffers that a low-watermark check made unnecessary.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2025

Devlog

More workarounds for Apple

GarageBand silently stops calling ProcessBlock, so Anukari now detects the auto-bypass and hands the physics simulation to a background thread.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2025

Devlog

CPack considered harmful

I ditched CPack's crippled installer generators for Inno Setup and pkgbuild directly, and shipped a new AnukariEffect plugin for use in effect chains.

Evan Mezeske

Feb 2025

Devlog

Getting into the usability weeds

Physics explosions from oversized time steps now get auto-mitigated, with the GPU tracking peak velocity and silently resetting any voice that blows up.

Evan Mezeske

Jan 2025

Devlog

Digging into usability

A draggable entity palette with live-rendered thumbnails, color-coded connection highlighting, and camera icons that make the 3D controls discoverable.

Evan Mezeske

Dec 2024

Devlog

The chaos monkey lives

I built a chaos monkey that hammers Anukari's GUI with random pyautogui input. It found crashes I'd never have tested and ran 10 hours clean.

Evan Mezeske

Dec 2024

Devlog

Complications from custom 3D models

Custom 3D models broke my hard-coded hitboxes, so mouse picking now runs on Bullet Physics raycasts against convex hulls approximating the model geometry.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2024

Devlog

The new warp alignment optimizer

A minimax optimizer now packs Anukari's 11 entity types into 32 GPU warps to minimize branch divergence. Huge presets run up to 2x faster.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2024

Devlog

The CUDA port, and more optimization

The CUDA port is done with all goldens passing. Native 1024-thread blocks beat OpenCL's 256-thread cap, so big presets no longer double their latency.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2024

Devlog

Waste makes haste...?

MacOS won't up-clock the GPU for latency-sensitive audio, so Anukari now burns one warp on useless spin work. Latency dropped about 40 percent.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2024

Devlog

Starting to micro-optimize, and 3D artwork

Metal profiling shows the simulation is ALU-bound, so I'm chasing half floats and signed indexes, plus a visual style doc for hiring 3D artists.

Evan Mezeske

Nov 2024

Devlog

Improving DAW compatibility

After emailing DAW makers for NFR licenses I got Anukari stable in 13 hosts, fixing a Bitwig native window crash and a SymInitialize crash in Sonar.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Weird Filament bug on Metal backend

Random glitches on the Filament Metal backend came down to render passes without a color clear. Enabling clearing fixed it and I filed an upstream bug.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Lions, tigers, and high-DPI, oh my

Ableton's Auto-Scale Plug-In Window option sent me down the Windows DPI awareness rabbit hole and into a Vulkan swap chain scaling driver bug.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Reducing 3D renderer loading time

Async background asset loading plus a detachable cached renderer make reopening Anukari's VST GUI instant, even with 256 MB 2K skyboxes.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Configurable environment/skybox

Skyboxes and lighting are now zip-file presets anyone can build from an .hdr file, and the instrument's 3D models load from swappable .glb presets too.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

3D renderer quality settings menu

Filament now builds as a git submodule inside Anukari's CMake, and the renderer preferences menu has low, medium, high, and max speed presets.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

3D renderer native window bugs

Tracked down a JUCE bug duplicating mouse events between stacked NSViews on macOS, plus a Filament black screen on Intel Iris Xe OpenGL.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Bug in Google Filament's Vulkan code

Window resize crashes traced to Filament's Vulkan backend never destroying swap chains, plus a JUCE macOS bug where mouse hover flickers between windows.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

First hacked-together build with new renderer

I wired render-thread errors into the GUI thread and redid the camera controls, with rotate on right-click drag and pan on shift so touchpads work.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Ubershaders vs just-in-time compilation

Filament's JIT shader compilation was the whole startup delay, so I switched to ubershaders. The floating GUI now uses native OS child windows.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

New animations based on physics

Bodies scale with mass, springs thicken with stiffness and redden with tension, and links light up with signal. Also fought Filament's messy cleanup APIs.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

New 3D renderer parity with old renderer

The Filament renderer now matches the old OpenGL one, selection highlights and all. I deleted the hand-rolled renderer and fixed the Windows file browser.

Evan Mezeske

Oct 2024

Devlog

Fixing a crash in Ableton with WM_DESTROY

Ableton destroys the plugin window before the editor, crashing Filament's Vulkan swap chain. Hooking WM_DESTROY to shut the renderer down first fixed it.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Skybox and irradiance map working

A hacked-together skybox and irradiance map give the .glb objects environmental lighting, and masses and springs finally look right again.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Instanced .glb assets in new renderer

Filament now draws my Blender models as instanced .glb assets and gives me shadows and ambient occlusion for free. Asset caching is next.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Rendering on MacOS in Metal

The new renderer runs on macOS via Metal and an NSView overlay, with OpenGL fully removed. The macOS audio performance mystery remains unsolved.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

3D rendering in a hovering native window

After a dead end with WS_EX_LAYERED transparency, I'm drawing the 3D graphics in an HWND on top of the JUCE GUI, and native popup menus still appear.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Exploring options for using Google Filament

Getting Filament rendering into a JUCE window is harder than expected since JUCE hides its swap chain, and overlay native windows break menus.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

3D graphics / GPU audio interference?

On macOS the 3D graphics interfere with GPU audio even when nothing is drawn, so I'm starting the Filament port to rule out Apple's OpenGL.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Anukari audio computed on GPU with Metal

The OpenCL kernel now compiles and runs under Metal via macros and passes the golden tests, though the rough port still leaks memory everywhere.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Porting audio GPU code to Apple Metal

Split the simulator into a shared base with OpenCL and Metal children. Macros may let the same kernel source compile for OpenCL, Metal, and CUDA.

Evan Mezeske

Sep 2024

Devlog

Performance state of the union (bad on MacOS)

The GPU copy optimization landed well, and NVIDIA on Windows runs big presets fine, but MacOS OpenCL stays mysteriously memory-bound. Metal port is next.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

New optimization: mixing mics on GPU

Moving final microphone mixing onto the GPU should slash CPU-GPU copy bandwidth, my plan for the Mac performance problems pre-alpha testers uncovered.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

First pre-alpha installers out

Windows and MacOS installers finally work on other people's machines, after switching back to Apple Clang and a vcpkg triplet targeting MacOS 11.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Working through MacOS bugs for pre-alpha

Windows pre-alpha is solid, so now I'm chasing MacOS bugs like file chooser corruption, plus a pkg installer since a dmg can't place VST3 and AU files.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Working windows installer

One button now builds a signed Windows installer via CPack, EV certificate, EULA screen and clean uninstall included. MacOS packaging is next.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Writing bad crypto code

License activation C++ is in, and instead of mocking HTTP I wrote integration tests that hit the real license server with a test-only reset API.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Ephemeral downloads and license keys

Pre-alpha builds now download via short-lived Cloudflare R2 URLs so leaks go stale fast, plus license key verification in C++ and a round of vcpkg pain.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

This devlog is on the website now

The devlog and newsletter now live on anukari.com, imported from Discord and Substack, which I'm shutting down. Pre-alpha invite tooling is next.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Building a blog engine (for some reason)

I built the site's blog engine, imported the old Discord devlog entries, added tagging and RSS, and wired a bot to pipe new posts back into Discord.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

My TypeScript honeymoon period is over

A missing await on an async function led me to typescript-eslint's promise rules, which surfaced a dozen similar bugs in the new website's code.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Enjoying bugs in next.js

Moving MongoDB index creation into version-controlled TypeScript, then hitting a next.js bug where failed middleware makes server actions return undefined.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

License validation apis

The licensing API is done. The plugin sends a machine fingerprint plus license key and the server signs it back, a simple lock on the front door.

Evan Mezeske

Aug 2024

Devlog

Prepping website for pre-alpha

Auth, server-validated React form actions, and CSRF protection are working, so I'm pushing the website toward pre-alpha product key management.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

It's 2024 and implementing web auth still sucks

Six hours fighting next-auth.js to get email and password login working for product registration, since the docs push everyone toward OAuth.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Don't ever use boost::numeric::interval

After boost's interval library threw baffling singleton exceptions in my GUI fuzz tests, I replaced it with a 25-line Interval class that just works.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Rabbit holes with GUI animations

Making Exciter velocity sensitivity adjustable took an hour, then making the 3D animations track fully modulated loudness ate the rest of the day.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

MIDI note off modulation

Fixed the clanking when raising the voice instance slider (init state wasn't stored per-instance) and added MIDI note off velocity as a modulation source.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Polishing up MPE/polyphony support

Voice stealing now prefers released notes, which made MPE playable when holding a root note under a melody. Lots of polyphony GUI details cleaned up too.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Giving up on Python for web

Porting the whole website from Python to next.js took about three hours, and JSX plus React components beat every Python templating option I have tried.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Giving up on Google Cloud

Google Cloud Run made mapping a custom domain such a slog that I moved the site to railway.app, which had it serving in five minutes. NiceGUI is out too.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

MPE works on my ROLI seaboard!

Plugged in the ROLI Seaboard and MPE just worked, two notes bending in opposite directions. Also switched the new website from App Engine to Cloud Run.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

MPE support seemingly complete

MPE is implemented, including storing per-channel pitch, pressure, and CC74 between notes. Untested since my Seaboard came without the right USB cable.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Python, FastAPI, and NiceGUI for webapp

Spent the day on a new website in Python, FastAPI, and NiceGUI on App Engine, and landed on a three word tagline for Anukari, 3D Physics Synthesizer.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Second read-through of the MPE spec

MPE zones, channel counts, and pitch bend ranges are in the data model now, and the global pitch wheel bends any preset via time dilation.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Breaking ground on MPE support

With polyphony working well, I'm starting on MPE support ahead of my ROLI Seaboard's arrival, including the annoying MCM zone auto-configuration messages.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Voice instancing is amazing

Voice instancing works and it's better than I hoped. Time dilation retunes a full physics sim per note, and parallel GPU voices add zero slowdown.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Storing per-instance data

Reworking the data model so MIDI and modulation state can be stored per voice instance, groundwork that MPE support will build on directly.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Instanced instruments on the GPU

With code signing done and the macOS port shelved for now, I'm back on voice-instanced physics, running parallel instrument copies in OpenCL.

Evan Mezeske

Jul 2024

Devlog

Digitally signing binaries

Wrestling with code signing bureaucracy, from Apple Developer verification and D-U-N-S numbers to picking a Sectigo certificate for Windows binaries.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

FFT-based audio clip comparison for golden tests

Golden tests now compare audio via chunked FFTs and L2 distance, which surfaced an OpenCL bug on Mac where objects can legally live at address NULL.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

Cleaning up hacks from MacOS support

After cleaning up the macOS port hacks and re-verifying Windows, Anukari now runs fully on my M1 MacBook, though the golden tests need fuzzy matching.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

Restructuring GUI unit tests

JUCE resists testable apps, so on macOS I moved all the unit tests inside a full JUCEApplication, trading test isolation for tests that pass.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

Getting tests passing on MacOS

Back from paragliding and porting unit tests to MacOS, which forced a cleaner cross-platform approach to GUI testing than my hacky Windows-only setup.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

Anukari runs on MacOS now

Anukari finally builds and links on my M1 Macbook after homebrew Clang pain, though the OpenCL code crashes whenever a microphone or modulator appears.

Evan Mezeske

Jun 2024

Devlog

Voice instancing: it's alive!

Two voice instances now run in parallel GPU work groups and pass the golden tests. Links stay shared in memory, so only mutable entities duplicate.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

New memory layout for voice instancing

Most of the CPU-side refactor for the new voice instancing memory layout is done, with golden tests catching every break in the CPU-to-GPU data reshuffle.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

Starting work on instanced voice mode

Breaking ground on instanced voice mode, which turns any instrument polyphonic by using time dilation for tuning. Prototype first, design later.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

Bug with links that link to other links

My copy-paste fuzz test caught a subtle bug where links that connect to other links pasted in the wrong order, breaking the two-pass materialization.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

On-screen tuner

Anukari has a built-in tuner now. After wading through GPL-licensed and broken pitch estimation libraries, I settled on cycfi's q, fast and stable.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

Fuzz tests for copying and pasting

Copy and paste handles link and MIDI route edge cases now, backed by a fuzz test that pastes random entity subsets 10,000 times and checks invariants.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

Where to paste after copy?

Paste, duplicate and import now use AABB search to land entities in clear space, and simulator reset became trivial via full serialize and reload.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024

Devlog

Bad memory access on the GPU: pain

A fuzz test exposed OpenCL error -44 failures caused by out-of-bounds GPU memory access that persisted across teardown, apparently a driver bug.

Evan Mezeske

May 2024