@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! 🥰️

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)

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.

No idea if anyone will find this useful, but I needed it for my own plugin so I made a PR.

Use MatrixPeakMeter itemColour3 to colour the overs in the max peak display

If itemColour3 is defined for a MatrixPeakMeter (or rather, it has alpha) it will be used to colour the overs (>= 0.99f) in the max peaks.

I found myself wanting to colour the overs in red for the peak meter component. Initially I hardcoded them as red but later noticed itemColour3 isn't used for anything for this component, so it was an easy addition.

Use MatrixPeakMeter itemColour3 to colour the overs in the max peak display by weavermedia · Pull Request #759 · christophhart/HISE

If itemColour3 is defined for a MatrixPeakMeter (or rather, it has alpha) it will be used to colour the peaks in the max peaks. I found myself wanting to colour the peak overs in red for the peak m...

GitHub (github.com)

Just my 2¢ - you can see which commits are passing or failing CI on GitHub. It's probably a good idea not to try building from one of the commits that's failing for your OS (Mac/Win).

@d-healey If you try Bungee let us know how you get on. I'm very interested in Bungee Pro. The demos on the web sound great. The transient retention is excellent.

@d-healey Excellent

@tsempire I'm very happy to subscribe but please consider offering payment methods other than PayPal.

Stripe is easy to integrate and is overall a much nicer company to deal with than PayPal.

@d-healey said in HISE Bootcamp - Full Course for Beginners:

I can enable this, but then the system will wrap the YouTube video in its own player and we lose access to the subtitles annoyingly. So for now I'm valuing subtitles over convenience.

Good call

I like to 1.5x pretty much everything on YouTube so I'm watching them outside of the course page anyway for now. I'm sure when the content gets more in-depth I'll want to properly track where I'm at.

Kudos on doing all the fixes so quickly!

BTW, respect for putting this out for free. I would've happily paid £50 for this bootcamp course. I can't wait for the next lot of videos. CHARGE FOR THEM!

@d-healey said in HISE Bootcamp - Full Course for Beginners:

Can't mark videos as complete in the UI - assuming that's what the checkbox inputs are for?

Top right corner above the video - someone reported that this button was showing as white text on a white background so I fixed it this morning.

Ah, gotcha. I assumed the checkbox inputs next to the video names were where we're supposed to make them as complete.

Might be cool if they're marked as complete automatically, as the videos are watched.

@d-healey Yeah the end screen popups. The first one I mentioned is indeed now correct. Maybe just a YouTube brain fart?

But the second two are still wrong:

• "Compress to Monolith" goes to "Build audio effect" instead of "Build GUI 1"
• "Articulation Switching" goes to "Build Module Tree" instead of "Build audio effect"

Example:

I'm investigating the possibility of building plugins using GitHub actions.

I've read a few posts in this forum and looked through @Christoph-Hart 's code at https://github.com/christophhart/vcsl_hise/blob/master/build.sh

Just so I'm clear - to build a plugin in a GitHub action, I'll need both the full HISE source code and a compiled version of HISE?

Or do I just need to git clone the source code in the GitHub workflow?

Great work @d-healey , as usual!

I learned a ton from it. I've been using HISE for months but yet to finish/release my first plugin. These videos got me a little further on that path. You simplified some topics that I found daunting after reading the docs. You dropped in a lot of keyboard shortcuts and quick tips that I didn't know.

I watched the whole thing yesterday - Mac-based first, I'll watch the Win/Linux videos later.

Here's some feedback for you on the course and some tips for other folks watching it.

Sign up feedback

I had some weirds quirks when signing up for Audio Dev School:

• Clicked 'Start Creating' on the homepage shows me a form with 'Nonce verification failed' warning and a sign in form. 'Start Creating' should go to a sign up page really, not sign in. That might be confusing.
• Clicking Register Now shows me a sign up form, which I completed. When I clicked Sign Up, the page refreshed to show the same empty sign up form again.
• I clicked Sign In and saw a sign in form with error 'Token expired'.
• Tried signing in and got 'Please verify your email address'. Clicked the link in the email verification email and finally got it.

This wasn't the smoothest sign up/ sign in process. I'm sure folks will work it out but it could be improved. Or you might be at the mercy of whatever WP plugins you're using.

Course feedback

• Can't mark videos as complete in the UI - assuming that's what the checkbox inputs are for?
• You talk about a lot of quirks/bugs in HISE and these are all fine if you know they're there. If not, they're very confusing and can stop a user in their tracks.
• In the Project Folders and Module Tree videos you talk a lot about scripting, but it isn't clear at that point that this course doesn't need any of that.
• Feels like you go too deep, but too quickly, into some things as you're showing the controls. Example: signal routing in the module header.
• Adding the invert to the Reverb button because the image stack was the wrong order introduced some complexity that could be avoided. Unless your point was to show the little invert trick? For a complete beginner, it might be better to show them the spec for the image stack and just make sure the images are right.
• When watching on YouTube, several of the videos have incorrect 'next video' links (see below), which confused the hell out of me for a minute! I'm sure you can fix these easily.

Tips for viewers

• If you like to watch this kind of stuff at higher playback speeds, like me, click through to watch them on YouTube. When you set a playback speed in the course page, it resets on the next video. On YouTube it keeps the speed setting when you use the 'next video' link at the end of the video.
• Incorrect 'next video' links on YouTube (so you don't get confused like me ):
• "Build Module Tree" goes to "Build the GUI", missing out all the sample mapping videos.
• "Compress to Monolith" goes to "Build audio effect" instead of "Build GUI 1"
• "Articulation Switching" goes to "Build Module Tree" instead of "Build audio effect"
• Some of the later videos are completely missing 'next video' links

For reference: 2020 M1 MacBook Air on Sonoma 14.7 and Safari 18.0

@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!

@daniloprates Ooh, nice! I never use caps lock, might try that