Captain's Log: Stardate 78612.4

I was pleasantly surprised to find that getting Anukari working as an AAX plugin was pretty straightforward. I mean, I would have preferred if Pro Tools would just support VST3 instead of this ridiculous song and dance of having their own custom plugin format. But it could have been a lot more painful, so I shouldn't complain too much.

There were some moderately annoying logistics around getting an iLok key, and getting the right licenses/certificates from PACE to be able to sign the AAX plugin. It all felt faintly silly, because I'm already signing all the DLLs and .exe files with OS certificates on both Windows and MacOS, and one might imagine that PACE would just work with the OS certificates. But I guess PACE wants more control over things than that.

Overall my biggest takeaway from my interaction with PACE/iLok is that things are what you'd expect from an anti-piracy company that sells software: the anti-piracy seems to be the main feature and the fact that you actually receive software that does something music-related is just an accidental byproduct. I guess I can understand why pro shops like the iLok, since it allows for a uniform licensing solution with offline access, but from a consumer perspective it is massively overcomplicated.

Ranting aside, it does seem that JUCE really does deliver on the promise of seamlessly producing plugins in each of its supported formats. I don't think that I ran into any case where a problem showed up in the AU or AAX version of Anukari that was JUCE's fault, which is pretty impressive.

One nice thing about the AAX port is that it helped me find a couple of lingering bugs that also affected VST3 and AU, but we're easy to reproduce in any of the 15 DAWs I've been testing against. Pro Tools does things in a way that JUCE's APIs do document correctly, but I had just never really accounted for. So the fixes for Pro Tools also fixed some issues that I've been having trouble tracking down in other DAWs.

With the AAX support looking good, now I really need to focus on creating more presets. I think that a good body of presets is currently the biggest blocker for starting to talk to distributors, which is pretty exciting!