NAMM trip

This is not so much a development blog as it is an update about NAMM. As many of you know, the Winter NAMM convention was held in Anaheim, CA (Jan 18-21). A few of us from the Project5 team went out there to help out with demos as well as meet with other third parties. While Cakewalk was heavily focused on SONAR related releases, we did put out a press release for Version 2.5 with the complete feature set (which was probably not news to most Project5 customers). But to others that had not heard about it, we got some very positive feedback.

The control surface support was an important thing and we met with a few companies including Frontier Design to discuss the implementation. They were excited and wanted to make sure they had a template for it before it was released. In addition we met with some of the best developer’s in the industry including Magnus from Sonic Charge. They make a cool piece of software called µTonic which you can check out at http://soniccharge.com/products. In addition, we met Christian from SampleRobot who is that maker of SampleRobot and WaveRobot. We talked about ways we could work together in the future. The technology is great and if you have Dimension, you should check it out at www.samplerobot.com as it can automatically create samples of real instruments that work in Dimension.

In addition to meeting other software developers, we also talked to a lot of content providers. One of our goals with this release is not only to improve the actually host, but to have more content available. We are talking more loop libraries, sample packs, instrument sounds, construction kits, presets and device chains. While we are not updating any of the instruments, new presets and patches are definitely in the works. We hope to offer everything from small, affordable construction kits to entire loop libraries. The content providers seem very eager to work with us and offer custom content for Project5 users which is good news.

Overall, NAMM was fun, and while it wasn’t a huge Project5 show, I am confident it will be a different story come next Winter NAMM. We met a few artists who are using Project5 for commercial projects and we hope to spotlight them in the coming months. You can expect more Project5 presence at future shows down the road.

Most requested features

Ok, so before we actually started work on Project5, we did a few surveys asking users what features they would like to see in Project5. I thought it might be good to share these with you just to know how we prioritized our tasks for Project5.

The top 5 were:

Input Quantize
Pre-post sends
Multi-out
Improved audio editing
Multiprocessor support

Looking at that list, we were able to tackle the first three and are in the process of putting finishing touches based on feedback from beta users.

Improved audio editing...we decided to address this by allowing the use of third party audio editors which certainly makes editing the audio easier.

Multiprocessor support...well we talked about that one, and we know people want it...but it wasn't possible to do it in this update. It will definitely come up in discussions for the next update.

We also added other stuff like ACT, which first appeared in SONAR 6, and other features we talked about internally. Internally, we also have a lot of good ideas for Project5 which we would like to rollout in the near future.

And in case you are wondering who we surveyed, we got the majority of responses from Project5 users as well as people who tried out the demo. There was certaintly a lot of good feedback from both groups, and you will some interesting changes to Project5 come April.