@bendurso Today I learned that right-clicking a module in edit mode shows a different context menu to right-clicking not in edit mode.

I'm fortunate that I started with a (small) audience, and I'm selling to a focussed crowd. My plugins serve a very specific niche and the producers there are always hungry for more authentic products.

I've never done any paid ads. I might do an experiment on Instagram one day. I see a lot of adverts for plugins in my feed and I'm curious how effective they are.

I sell on Gumroad. They take about 15% fee, then you pay payment processor fees. I haven't done the maths for the total cut but I'd say it's less than 20%.

It's a good deal for me because it includes basic web presence, file hosting, secure delivery, payment processing (cards, Apple Pay, Google and PayPal), email marketing and analytics.

I started selling in September 2022. I'd done a couple of free plugins before that through various platforms like SimpleGoods and SendOwl but didn't take it seriously until later.

When I started selling I posted each new product on my Facebook and Instagram accounts. The engagement was pretty good to start with but I noticed that over time, I got more results from sending emails to my ever-growing email list. When I launch a new product now, I only send it to my email list at first. Then later I post short clips to Instagram but they're supplemental to the email list.

You NEED an email list. They say "the money's in the list" and in my experience, that's 100% correct.

Free products are a great way to build your email list. Most people stay subscribed and as long as you don't flood them with emails, they're happy to receive them.

This is my email strategy:

• Launch email for every new product with 20% discount code, valid for 2 weeks
• Reminder email 48 hours before the launch discount ends
• One email per month with 20% discount off a single product, valid for 2-3 days

That's it. I don't like to bombard my list with too many emails. I'm on some Gumroad seller lists where they send continual discounts, sometimes daily. This would be way too much for me as a customer.

Gumroad includes email marketing, which is a bonus because when your list gets large things like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc get into the $100's/month.

I can target emails to people who have or haven't bought specific products. Very handy for offering a discount only to those who haven't bought something. Or offering a discount for a product Y to those who have already bought product X. You can also target by how much someone has spent, so you can offer extra discounts or free stuff to your most loyal customers.

Gumroad also includes extra features like affiliates (having others push your products for a % split), collaborators (where you can split a products revenue with someone else), email automations (for sending drip emails to customers - I don't use those) and upsells (recommended products at checkout).

It does have some downsides. The download links in the receipt emails sometimes don't work and you have to send a link manually to the customer (Gumroad have so far refused to acknowledge this as an issue). I also find their fees to be expensive compared to other services, but for what I get built-in I still think it's worth it for now.

Something else that might be of interest is that Gumroad recently made the source code available, so if there's a feature you want to add and you're handy with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript you might be able to contribute.

Happy to report this has been merged in to develop branch!

@aaronventure said in Quick F5 tip for Mac users:

@d-healey Hold Shift while typing to amplify my anger.

Exactly this! Left pinky on the SHIFT and hammer those keys!

Same on iOS. Instead of double-tapping the shift key to lock it, I shift uppercase every character, just so it makes me more angry!

@d-healey LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL RELEASE CURVE! 🥰️

@Chazrox Wouldn't you have to call SomeFunctions.HelperFunction() outside the namespace?

I use Myriad to batch process samples. It's saved me untold amount of hours in the last few years.

zynaptiq: MYRIAD

Zynaptiq - Audio software based on artificial intelligence technology.

(www.zynaptiq.com)

You can run individual tasks or create workflows to batch process in groups.

My usual workflow for trimming samples is something like:

1. Trim End below -70dB (tweak this based on the group of samples)
2. Fade End below -60dB (this produces a nice fade to zero at the end)
3. I also usually trim sample start below -80dB, at zero-crossing, because Logic Auto Sampler always has a bit of start gap.

You can do a lot more in Myriad (normalising to peak or LUFS, trim around loop points, set MIDI notes and velocity ranges, etc). Very handy app!

@Christoph-Hart Just came back to look at this and finally solved it!

HISE uses the system Ruby version to look for xcpretty.

If you're using a Ruby version manager like rvm, Rbenv, ASDF or chruby you'll need to switch to the system Ruby to install xcpretty.

I use chruby so I did:

$ chruby system // or however your version manager switches to system Ruby

// Confirm I'm using the system Ruby
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.6.10p210 (2022-04-12 revision 67958) [universal.arm64e-darwin23]
$ which ruby
/usr/bin/ruby

// Install xcpretty for the system Ruby
$ sudo gem install xcpretty
Password: ********
Fetching rouge-2.0.7.gem
Fetching xcpretty-0.3.0.gem
Successfully installed rouge-2.0.7
Successfully installed xcpretty-0.3.0
2 gems installed

// Run the same command that HISE runs to make sure it's there
$ gem list xcpretty
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
xcpretty (0.3.0)

@griffinboy I really dislike huge discounts as a marketing strategy. The biggest discount I ever do on my products is 20%. And I only send that out to my email list. It's not public on the site.

To be clear - my plugins are already very low price (max is $30) so I don't have a lot to gain with the 95% discount strategy. If you're selling at $100+ it makes more sense, but I still wouldn't do it.

I do a 20% launch discount, to my list, and a monthly(-ish) 20% discount on one selected product. And that email only goes out to folks who haven't yet bought that product.

My public product pages are never discounted unless you arrive via the link from my emails with the 20% code included in the URL, or you use a code from my email at the checkout.

Even for the Instagram ads I started running in July, I don't have any discount. It's just the demo video and a one sentence description. No discount, no pressure, no yelling. My approach is just "here's the product, hope you like it enough to buy it".

@d-healey Regarding ROAS on Meta, my takeaway is that you can mostly ignore that - unless you're very carefully and accurately attributing views/sales at the server level. It's way underestimated on my ads. The way browsers work these days has largely done away with simple pixel tracking/attribution.

My Meta ROAS is showing as 1.6 but I'm getting anywhere between 5-10x my daily budget back in extra revenue. No new releases, no sales, no other marketing, no extra email being sent out. I just started the ads and the money came in.

I had a hard time making the my MacBook keyboard F5 trigger Compile in HISE.

I tried fudging with all the keyboard/accessibility/dictation settings but the F5 key still wouldn't 'just be F5'. Seems like the usual 'Apple knows best' thing where you can't quite override the intended behaviour.

So I just installed a small free Mac app Karabiner-Elements and now I have a real F5 key!

Process:

1. Download and install Karabiner-Elements
2. Do all the system settings required for it to run in the background
3. Open the app and head to Function Keys
4. Change F5 from 'Dictation' to Function Keys > F5
5. Compile away!

I don't usually install apps for things like this but I really couldn't find a way to do this in the macOS system settings.

@Orvillain Sounds great!

@felix-martinz I'd get a very basic RNBO patch working in a HISE plugin first.

Just to make sure all the transfer steps are working properly.

Then slowly add features to see where it breaks.

EDIT: I'm watching this topic because I'm about to embark on RNBO > HISE too.

@VirtualVirgin The editor drives me batty. It functions so differently to what I'm used to that I'm constantly making subtle typos that fail to compile.

I'm looking into coding in my familiar code editor and hopping back to HISE just to hit F5. Thinking about it, there might even be a way to automate it. Set up a file watcher and every time a script file int he HISE project is saved, tell HISE to compile.

@Chazrox Wouldn't you have to call SomeFunctions.HelperFunction() outside the namespace?

@pcs800 Index 0 sets it to Goniometer, which does indeed crash.

If you want Oscilloscope or Spectral Analyser, set the index to 1 or 2, respectively.

EDIT: I see you already tried index 2 and got no display. It's working for me here on develop 9ed54807 (Aug 9th 2025)

HISE | UI Components | Audio Analyser

A floating tile that connects to an Analyser Module and visualizes the audio signal

(docs.hise.dev)

@griffinboy Gotcha. I do that but with free products. I have 'Plus' versions of a couple of my free products and a decent amount of people upgrade.

In my situation, I made the free products first and so many people asked for more features that I made the 'Plus' versions to satisfy that need.

You have to weigh the balance between the two approaches. Getting X number of folks in through heavily discounted product and possibly converting more of them to a higher value product, versus getting many more folks in through a free product and probably converting a lower percentage.

Only you can decide which is best, based on your products, your pricing, your market, and your customer list.

@griffinboy I really dislike huge discounts as a marketing strategy. The biggest discount I ever do on my products is 20%. And I only send that out to my email list. It's not public on the site.

To be clear - my plugins are already very low price (max is $30) so I don't have a lot to gain with the 95% discount strategy. If you're selling at $100+ it makes more sense, but I still wouldn't do it.

I do a 20% launch discount, to my list, and a monthly(-ish) 20% discount on one selected product. And that email only goes out to folks who haven't yet bought that product.

My public product pages are never discounted unless you arrive via the link from my emails with the 20% code included in the URL, or you use a code from my email at the checkout.

Even for the Instagram ads I started running in July, I don't have any discount. It's just the demo video and a one sentence description. No discount, no pressure, no yelling. My approach is just "here's the product, hope you like it enough to buy it".

@d-healey Regarding ROAS on Meta, my takeaway is that you can mostly ignore that - unless you're very carefully and accurately attributing views/sales at the server level. It's way underestimated on my ads. The way browsers work these days has largely done away with simple pixel tracking/attribution.

My Meta ROAS is showing as 1.6 but I'm getting anywhere between 5-10x my daily budget back in extra revenue. No new releases, no sales, no other marketing, no extra email being sent out. I just started the ads and the money came in.

@d-healey said in Wordpress plugin to block temp mail signups:

A customer who doesn't provide a real email doesn't benefit my business in the long term

I wouldn't say that's necessarily true. After trying your free stuff, they could convert to a 'real' customer with a real email address. Or they could tell others about your products. I don't have any hard data but I'm pretty sure I get a lot of word of mouth.

But otherwise, yeah agreed. Fortunately it's something I don't have to worry about, selling on Gumroad. They have built-in email marketing and they take care of hard/soft bounces, etc.

At least on my site, nobody who uses a fake email for a free product has bought anything (not with the same fake email anyway).

Hmmm.. that's an interesting metric I'd like to know about my users.

@mjc123 According to the docs, HISE doesn't have any built-in animation functionality.

You have to set the animation rate yourself with a Timer.

So it should be easy step to sync that Timer rate to a time-based modulator.

HISE | Scripting | ScriptPanel

The ScriptPanel API methods

(docs.hise.dev)

I hope this doesn't hurt your customer experience.

A lot of people are concerned with security these days, and who they give their email address to.

Using temp/throwaway email addresses is a fact of life these days.