Last spring and summer, I decided to stop dragging a bunch of hardware synthesizers back and forth to band practice and start using a laptop as an all-in-one solution. This is more or less possible thanks to the availability of a variety of virtual instruments in Audio Units format that rival (and in some cases faithfully reproduce) the hardware synths of olde.
Seems simple. I need a MIDI controller keyboard – I chose an 88 key model and figured I’d map various instruments to different ranges of keys. So I started looking for an Audio Units host oriented towards live performance.
I came up empty. Nearly all of them are oriented towards sequencing and multi-track recording. They could kind of do what I wanted, but the user interface wasn’t oriented towards what I needed. There was one product – an independent program called RAX – that seemed right – only its author had just withdrawn it from the market. I managed to get an evaluation license from the developer but I disqualified it because it had a problem handling sustain pedal events and its future was uncertain.
So I set out to build my own and I’ve succeeded. It works well enough, is pretty bare bones, but allows the user to do complex splits and layers very quickly. I call it JambaLaya and I use it all the time. It isn’t quite production quality and there are missing feature I’d like to add. But it is a great feeling to control your own destiny and not have to worry about a critical piece of software disappearing from the market.
Now I’m trying to decide what to do with it. I could polish it up and offer it for sale, but since I wrote it two things have happened. RAX was acquired by a new publisher who is once again selling and supporting it and Apple has released a Logic 8 update with a program called Mainstage that is also oriented towards live performance. In both cases, I prefer the way the JambaLaya works, the UI is much more feature dense and it works the way I expect (little wonder, since I wrote it). I think in the short term, the best thing is to start a community website for it and give it away. So I think that’s the plan unless somebody has a better idea. I just need more time to configure the Drupal site and get that going.