This post was originally posted on the old website, 1st February 2024. Mirage v3 was the precursor to Floe.
Over the course of the last few months my goals for FrozenPlain and Mirage have been solidifying. Mirage is still my sole focus at the moment, along with the associated infrastructure needed for distributing it: website, servers and installation system.
The overall goal of FrozenPlain is to provide you with tools to make beautiful music. There's sometimes hurdles on the way to that goal though: websites, checkouts, installers, bad documentation and tools that are overly complicated. I want to largely free us from these issues and set up the project for big growth: new sounds and new features.
Goals for 2024:
- New plugin formats for Mirage: CLAP and VST3. And continue supporting AU. 70% done.
- Ability to use instruments from different Mirage libraries at the same time. 60% done.
- New installation system for Mirage: receive raw plugin files for manual installation or use a tiny dead-simple installer program. No log-ins or download-tickets. 60% done.
- New installation system for Mirage libraries: download zip files and click an 'Add Library' button on Mirage's GUI. Or manually copy the files to a given location. 10% done.
- New website with an improved way to buy products and receive your download links. And for us, something that's easy-to-maintain. 70% done.
- New documentation, manuals and support pages. 0% done.
- Update all existing Mirage libraries to new format and improve loop points. 40% done.
- New format for Mirage libraries. Rather than our custom MDATA binary format, Mirage libraries will be a folder of FLAC/WAV files and an adjacent config file. The config file is written in the Lua programming language but follows similar ideas to SFZ or Decent Sampler formats. Mirage might be able to load those formats in the future too. 70% done.
- Create your own Mirage libraries using the new library format mentioned above. This will done using a programming language (Lua), for now. 70% done.
- Put into place systems for gracefully handling backwards compatibility of the plugin so that you can gain new features without breaking old DAW projects. Now is the time to do this as we are starting support for new plugin formats. 20% done.
- Stretch goal: make Mirage open-source.
Thank you for reading and see you in the next one.
