It's 404, yo!
Make any sample pack SP-404 ready.
I make beats on a Roland SP-404 MkII. Great little box, but it has one habit that drives everyone crazy. You download a sample pack, drop it on the SD card, and the SP just says "Unsupported File". No reason, no hint. Turns out most pro and Splice packs are 32-bit float WAVs, and the SP only accepts 16-bit. So you either convert every file by hand in a DAW or mess around with ffmpeg in the terminal, across hundreds of samples. It's miserable.
So I built the thing I wished existed. You drop a whole pack in, it tells you in plain language why each file would fail ("32-bit float to 16-bit", "96 kHz resampled", "FLAC to WAV"), and converts the lot into exactly what the SP accepts, keeping your folder structure intact. Fully offline, native Swift, no ffmpeg to bundle. It's called It's 404, yo! and it's live on the Mac App Store for $0.99. Sibling to a smaller thing I made before called It's mono, yo!.
Two things I picked up that might be useful to someone here.
First, Apple rejected the first build under Guideline 4 (design). When you closed the only window, the app kept running with no way to reopen it. The fix was literally one line, quit when the last window closes, and it got approved next round. Obvious in hindsight, easy to miss if you build single window Mac apps.
Second, and this is the one I'd actually love opinions on. All my paid apps are also open source. The full code is on GitHub under MIT. If you want, you can build it yourself for free. Or you pay a buck in the App Store and get the easy install plus updates. I like that it keeps me honest, and since it's an app that touches your files, letting people see exactly what runs on their machine feels right. But I know some folks think open sourcing a paid app is leaving money on the table.
So, if you sell software, would you open source it too? Anyone here done it and regretted it, or found it actually helped?
The app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785918261
The code: https://github.com/JarlLyng/its-404-yo
1 Comment
I don't think the interesting tradeoff is open source vs paid.
It's whether you're selling the code or the convenience. If your ideal customer is a musician trying to fix a workflow, spending time compiling an app is already a cost. In that case, open sourcing the code can actually reinforce trust without changing what they're really paying for.