If you enjoy living on the edge, and keeping up with the very latest FuzzMeasure developments, you should check out the FuzzMeasure Latest Builds page. There you’ll find the very latest published build of FuzzMeasure that’s not yet ready for public consumption.

Sometimes I fix very nasty bugs that block certain users from getting work done. In order to get these folks up & running as quickly as possible, I need somewhere to put my latest builds that weren’t ready to be released yet.

Because these releases will eventually become final, and more than one user is affected by these fixes, the obvious solution is a public page I can point the affected users at. However, I would also like to get a head start of having some other (brave!) people use and test these builds before I increase distribution further.

If you are one of these brave people, and would like to live life on the bleeding edge, you can set FuzzMeasure up so that it checks for the latest unreleased build automatically on launch. The instructions to do this are at the bottom of the FuzzMeasure Latest Builds page.

One very common question I get asked by new users is to demonstrate how hardware should be set up for measurements. In the past, a severe lack of time meant that gathering and presenting this information was nearly impossible.

After an entire day of effort (cleaning off my desk to take pictures, taking and cleaning up the pictures, coding up the HTML, etc) I finally have the Getting Started with FuzzMeasure Pro guide online.

I only have a single main section in that document, covering the basic setup of audio hardware for new users. I touch on a few topics like loopback connections, which are required for device correction.

I plan on extending the document further over time, and incorporating the content into the manual one day. In the meantime, I find this method of presentation very simple to maintain and accessible for new users that may not have downloaded the software yet, so putting it in the manual isn’t a high priority at the moment. (Believe it or not, I get a lot of requests from users to send them the manual because they’re on Windows or earlier releases of Mac OS X).

If you have any requests for topics to be covered in the document, please send me an email and I will do my best to get that content added.

I’m working at home on FuzzMeasure for only a week, and now I have FuzzMeasure 3.0.1 ready to go out the door. Coincidence? Hardly.

I fixed some pretty nasty issues (broken AIFF exporting of impulses and stimulus signals), along with some harmless-but-irritating ones (like the look of the graph markers).

Having all this extra time means I could package up a subset of the work I’ve been doing into a maintenance release. In the part-time era of SMUG, the work would get piled into a giant bucket that would eventually become FuzzMeasure 3.1 (or, 4.0 if we want to look at how I’ve done things most recently).

Enjoy the update, and keep filing bugs as you find them!

In past years, I made a point of declaring an area of focus (similar to a New Year’s resolution). 2006 marked a year of making more mistakes, and in 2007 I focused on refinement. All my declarations hold for the future, so I still plan on making plenty of mistakes, and I will continue to refine the products that I release.

This year I held off on my public declaration due to the sensitivity of what I was proposing — in 2008, I declared independence. I resigned from my full-time job to pursue a career in independent Mac software development. My first day as a full-time employee of SuperMegaUltraGroovy is February 8th, which also happens to be my birthday.

This is huge. I am turning my life upside-down to pursue a dream I’ve had since I was in grade school. When I first started to program, I was interested in designing my own software, and making music with my computer. From that point forward, writing audio-related software on my own would turn out to be the ultimate career goal.

I’ve written a handful of applications to work with sound over the years (ranging from software synthesis to MIDI control applications), but the experience required to ship a complex application just wasn’t there. FuzzMeasure gave me an excuse to carry an idea to completion, though over the past year I’ve grown frustrated with my inability to devote more time to the software I love.

In June 2006, at WWDC, I started to wonder how long it’d be until I could live out this fantasy. I was a long way from making my salary with FuzzMeasure, and 3.0 had a few months left to go. During this time, Andrew grew older, and even more fun to spend time with — I very much prefer playing with my son to writing more code outside of my day job.

When FuzzMeasure 3.0 finally launched, the response was great. A healthy fraction of existing customers upgraded, and plenty of new customers came knocking at my door. I was still short of making my salary, but the upward trajectory of sales and interest was hard to ignore. I knew I had to start considering a move to full-time development of FuzzMeasure and future products, and quickly.

The final decision was made over the holidays. My wife and I deliberated over the sacrifices we will have to make, but we both agree that I have the passion and skill to pull this off. Given the current sales growth, and a possibility for increased revenue with new applications, it seems like the right thing to do.

We have enough savings to sustain us for about 2 years in addition to the current (relatively stable) revenue stream. Of course, I’m planning to revisit the whole strategy much sooner than that in case things start to go badly — I can’t afford to bankrupt my family.

So with some big sacrifices, a proven track record of skill, and a burning desire to create outstanding products, I’m confident that I can make this work. I look forward to bringing the world more SuperMegaUltraGroovy applications, and continuing to make FuzzMeasure the world’s best audio measurement tool.

John Atkinson, editor of Stereophile Magazine, has written up an article about the measurement equipment he uses to produce the measurement sidebars (example) for Stereophile’s equipment review articles. According to John, FuzzMeasure is increasingly becoming John’s weapon of choice for measuring the frequency responses of loudspeakers.

Continue reading Measurements, Maps & Precision on Stereophile’s site.