It's that magical time of the year again, when we (and by "we" I mean literally everyone engaged in commerce of any sort) try to get you (and by "you" I include me) to buy things for less than they normally cost.

Audio Damage is no exception to this. As has been the case for the last couple years, we try to line up our sale here on our website so it matches with Plugin Boutique's sale. As a result, it runs somewhat longer than we're really comfortable with, but we figure hey, PiB is bigger than us, so they must know something we don't. (Please note that Plugin Boutique is our only authorized reseller. If you see Audio Damage products for sale anywhere else, it is, at bare minimum, a scam, since they're selling you something they stole, and more likely acting as the payload for a crypto miner or other malware.)

In any case, as of this writing there are 7 days left to the sale. We make a solid third of our entire yearly gross during this sale, so it is fairly important to how we operate; it gives us a little freedom to make bigger and better products, since the only other consistent way to generate a large lump of cash is releasing a new product, and then the tendency is to put out a lot of mediocre products, of course. We look forward to hearing from dozens of people in 8 days telling us that, despite the multiple emails, tweets, and Discord updates, they didn't realize there was a sale that lasted nearly 30 days until the 31st day. Happens every year. 

Which brings us to Discord. As you may or may not know, we have set up a Discord for the Audio Damage user community, and hired a community manager (he is named Scott and you'll see him in the Discord). Initially it was out of an abundance of caution in case Twitter went down, to provide a new avenue for support. But it immediately morphed in to a fairly interesting community of like-minded folks, and we welcome you to join us. Both Adam and I are present throughout the day on most weekdays (from about 5AM to about 10PM Mountain time) and, barring any other commitments, a fair chunk of the weekend. This is the easiest and fastest way to get support or ask a question about AD products, and is also a good place to discuss our products in particular and electronic music production in general. We look forward to seeing you there. 

And finally, what are we building in there? One of the reasons that Axon 2, Replicant 2, and Grind aren't ported to M1 is that they were among the very first plugins we built in JUCE, and as such, still use our extremely out-of-date parameter manager rather than JUCE's sexy built-in parameter management, which is known as AudioProcessorValueTreeState, or APVTS colloquially, if you were curious. The methods that our old parameter manager uses have been deprecated, so we would essentially need to rewrite all three plugins from first principles. Since we had to do that anyhow, we decided to take the opportunity to heavily update them. First up is Replicant 3. We hope to have this out before the end of the year. No idea if we'll make that, but it won't be long thereafter. It is a from-bare-metal rewrite of Replicant, and picks up a lot of new features to turn it from a fairly straightforward buffer juggler (although one of the first of its kind) in to an interesting and inventive modern multi-effect. It will still be able to do all the things you have always used Replicant for, but we are writing it with an eye for the future, and as-yet-unheard techniques and sounds. More on this as we get closer to the release. 

And with that, have a happy, healthy, and inspirational holiday season! We thank you for your continued support, and look forward to creating together with you in the years to come! 

- Chris Randall
- Nov 28, 2022
- Phoenix, Arizona