Hey dear reader,

It’s been nearly two months since our last newsletter update, and two months is plenty of time to cover a lot of ground. So buckle up, because we’ve got a lot to share!

First, the short version:

• The Elementary Marketplace is now live!
  • With two new free VST3/AU plugins and,
  • A 10-day promotion offering free code licensing for SRVB
• Free Tier / Pro Tier pricing has been removed
  • All of the core packages/renderers are now free to use
• Major improvements to the Plugin Dev Kit
• Two new utility nodes
• Improved internal rendering algorithm for better engine performance

Keep reading for all the details.

Elementary Marketplace

Today we’re launching the Elementary Marketplace, a place to discover high level addons to your own Elementary applications. Looking to pull a reverb off the shelf and add it to your own synth? Check out our updated and rebranded SRVB package. Or maybe you could use a textbook hard-knee dynamics Compressor. Both of our available packages now ship as free VST3/AU plugins for MacOS 10.11+, which you can find on their respective marketplace pages, and now through Wednesday, June 22nd, you can install the @elemaudio/srvb package from the Elementary Private registry for free– go ahead and give it a test drive!

The future of the Marketplace is one of our major focuses moving forward. Over the coming months, you can expect to see a series of new packages, plugins, and tools to help build out your own apps. Not only will these be official @elemaudio packages, we are officially looking to onboard community packages and plugins to the marketplace. If you have an idea you’d like to bring to life on the Elementary Marketplace, get in touch with us on the Elementary Community Discord!

Pro Tier Licensing is No More

With the announcement of the Marketplace, we’re simultaneously dropping the current Free Tier / Pro Tier licensing situation. Why? Well, the past few months have shown that the restricted features of the Pro Tier can act as a gatekeeper to users who just want to see if Elementary is right for them. We want as many people as possible to dip their toes in this new way of writing audio software, so we want to remove as many barriers to entry as possible.

But I just paid for a pro license…?

To everyone who has purchased a pro license, let me first say thank you! Your purchase has sponsored the continued development of Elementary, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without you. Your purchase is not lost; as we roll out our near-term roadmap of tools and features on the Elementary Marketplace, your license will automatically be rolled over to include a set of paid packages, including the long-awaited plugin export tool.

Core packages are now public

As part of this improvement, we’ve shipped a small update to the Elementary Private Registry: in particular, the core packages that you’re used to (@elemaudio/core, @elemaudio/plugin-renderer, @elemaudio/web-renderer, etc) are now available on the public npm registry– no Elementary account required. You will still need your Elementary account for fetching packages listed on the Marketplace, but all other npm install requests will simply redirect to the public npm registry.

Breaking: because of this update to package resolution, you may find that your existing npm install steps have broken. The fix is simple, just update your dependencies to the latest for the new package resolution step.

Plugin Dev Kit Improvements

As you surely noticed with the announcement of the free plugins on the Marketplace, shipping plugins written with Elementary is finally here. We’ve already shipped some sneaky updates for interacting with plugin/host parameters, state saving/loading from the host, and drastically improved performance, check out the latest plugin-renderer docs for the new new.

Moreover, our new Compressor package is not just a free utility on the Private Registry or a free audio plugin, it’s also an open source example of what it looks like to write and ship a complete audio plugin using Elementary. The only missing piece is the export process, which will be shared shortly in our next update. If you’re interested in participating in the Elementary Marketplace, let this project serve as a simple template for shaping your code to make publishing and exporting easy.

A note on Windows

Many of you have been waiting for the Elementary Dev Kit to support Windows. Unfortunately, with this update, we have decided to defer Windows support a bit longer. Why? Well, building out Windows support has taken far more time than expected, and ultimately has prevented the release of this marketplace and the tools for producing MacOS plugins. After a hard re-prioritization, we’re focusing on the Marketplace and necessary tools for MacOS plugins, and aiming for Windows support to follow just after.

The Rest…

Lastly, we’ll wrap up with a quick add to our announcement here: the updated core packages include two new nodes for building your applications:

• el.maxhold – a simple peak holding utility
• el.sdelay – an optimized delay line for fixed-length delays

The same updates shipped a significant improvement to the internal rendering process; this update will generally be something you won’t notice, but for improved CPU usage for your existing apps.

More to Come

That’s it for this announcement, but we’re really excited for this change. Next up, we’ll be sharing some new packages on the marketplace, along with new plugins and tools for your own apps. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, Nick