Lots of progress on Heartburn. It's got a nice GUI now, and I'm almost ready to ship the damn thing. A demo version is available here, and the current state of it has additional morphing features and prettier knobs.

The laptop is semi-down again; the cord running from the power brick to the machine has an intermittent short in it (I think), so even plugged in, if you touch the cord it loses power and has to go to battery. Dell is kindly sending me another power supply, but in the meantime I'm trying to leave it alone.

So yesterday that left me poking around on the iMac again, reading up on Audio Units. Audio Units is Apple's specification for audio plugin componentry, conceptually similar to VST or DXi, but newer, less widely supported, and a bit overengineered (as opposed to VST which is a bit underengineered). Apple bought EMagic recently, so their Logic audio software is going to support Audio Units; it doesn't look like Steinberg is going to support AU, but it can't be long before someone implements a AU-to-VST wrapper module (wrappers to interface between VST and DXi abound on the Windows side of things). In any case, I think there's going to be a big market-share struggle between Logic/AU and Cubase/VST in the next couple of years.

So I have a choice here between playing with OSX VSTs on Cubase or OSX AUs on Logic. My gut feeling is that I'd rather be using AU, because there's official Apple support behind it, and VST is internally pretty ugly. It does mean portability between my Windows work and my OSX work is harder; in practice, given enough time and effort, I'll effectively wind up with a third API, the Borogove Plugin Architecture, and write a wrapper on each platform to interface to that. In the short term, though, I will probably just do different stuff on different platforms.

Since someone compared some of Heartburn's sounds to Throbbing Gristle, I'm thinking my first AU effect should be a software implementation of the famed Gristleizer.