![]() ![]() Then a few days later, you posted, "Here's a patch. Let's talk about it," and there was some back and forth. Someone was talking about UI in the Mac port being un- responsive. I saw a good example on the Reaper forums. JF: That's something that we've felt strongly about from the beginning, and it's something I felt when I started my first company - which I then lost control of and sold. Generally speaking, it is more effective than any QA process I've ever seen in a corporate environment, and it's much more efficient.Ī big aspect of Reaper seems to be your relationship with your users, versus the way users are probably accustomed to being treated by large companies. It's open - anyone who wants to do it can. JF: Users who are psyched to be using a latest and greatest feature and to give feedback suggesting how things should be. ![]() So you have users who are willing to be ongoing beta testers? We obviously do some internal QA, but for the vast majority we rely on a group of testers who test builds when we add new functionality. ![]() It ends up decreasing the efficiency of the process for some margin level of effectiveness, and it's mostly a cover your ass sort of measure. So you try, and you waste a ton of time and effort testing things, which then slows down your release cycle, and slows down development as a result. You are never going to come close to getting all these states tested. It's somewhat effective, but in software, there's just so much complexity, so many states things can be in, that anyone who thinks QA is even north of 50 percent effective is delusional. The big company process is that you have elaborate QA processes where you test all kinds of different things for every release. This is a good example - in software development, there's something called QA, which is quality assurance. If our program was a gigabyte, say we included a ton of samples, a lot of things wouldn't be possible. ![]() Being able to update the website and post builds online for people is important. As a developer, being able to build everything quickly and easily is important. There's also an emphasis on keeping it so we don't have to deal with additional bullshit, which is easier when you keep things small. In that sense we don't compromise the product or the way we treat users in order to meet some arbitrary goal. We own the company, so we're only accountable to ourselves. We don't have a big machine that we need to support and we don't ever need to push out new releases in order to increase revenue. We can take the time and do things right. Our overhead is really low, and because we're making software, we don't have per-unit costs. Other DAW companies are easily 10, if not 100, times as big as yours. If you look back at what we've done in the last four years, given the number of people involved (which at this point is up to three) we've definitely come a long way. I remember reading about Reaper back then. JF: Initially, and Christophe joined in 2006. At a certain point I decided that I would like to have control over the environment I would work in to make music, and I started making my own, just for fun. I used it for a while, and got a little annoyed with some of the limitations it had for audio. Christophe turned me on to Vegas - I think it was Vegas 4.0. My career is as a programmer, but a few years before, I started playing music for fun. JF: It grew out of frustration with the existing software that I'd tried to use. Why would anybody start writing a DAW in 2005? I talked with Justin and Cockos co-owner Christophe Thibault at their San Francisco office. Since then Reaper has grown up to become a solid contender in the DAW market, powered by a development philosophy and style that would never fly at most big software shops. Justin started a new company, Cockos, and began work on a DAW called Reaper. In 1997 he dropped out of college to release Winamp and found Nullsoft, which was later sold to AOL. Justin Frankel has always pushed the envelopes of music and software. ![]()
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