I hope this is not my legacy

OK here goes. The confessional post which I have been dreading for the last 18 months is here. I have fended and fobbed off a lot of people in the last two years and I really need to apologise. For anyone who has come to this website by chance, the domain beatbutchermpc.com isn’t just random. In the summer of 2008 I started writing an application with the aim of making life for Akai MPC500 sampler/synthesizer users easier. I got a lot of great support from the community at mpc-forums.com and worked very very hard for about three weeks to release an alpha version of the program. I then went on holiday, moved back to university life, got a job and all sorts of other distractions which prevented me from putting much time into development. I did however make quite a lot of progress from the alpha release, including a massive code refactor (mainly in order to implement undo/redo functionality) and a brand new GUI.

I have kept promising that eventually the program will be released, and I really want to fulfil that promise, to myself and to all of the people who have shown me support. One of the main reasons why I have found it hard to put time into the project is the fact that I became very disheartened with Akai for constantly putting arbitrary restraints on the hardware and operating systems which considerably limit the device’s usability in a studio environment (I do think it is a great portable tool). Another reason was that I felt like I have learned an incredible amount about desktop application development in getting BeatButcherMPC to the state it is currently in, but there wasn’t much more that I could get out of it. I have decided that this outlook was a mistake, and something huge which I need to learn is how to finish a project and release it. So that is what I am going to do.