I'm curious what rebuilding taught you that the first launch didn't. Was there anything about how people evaluated MixDesk X that challenged one of your original assumptions about what they actually cared about?
Honestly, the rebuild didn't start as a strategy. My daughter was using an ASIO-based utility to put an EQ on her mic — clunky GUI, and it kept crashing and causing problems. I wanted to give her something that just stayed up, and I wanted it on Windows, so I rebuilt the whole thing in Go to go cross-platform. The first version had been macOS-only and paid; at that point I figured — so what, give it away for free.
Then, like Directors Plan for vMix, it ran a bit past its original scope. It's basically become a software version of the dbx DriveRack — the loudspeaker-management box I used to lean on as a Swiss-army knife back in my messy fixed-install days. That's where the presets, effects and the measurement side come from: Linkwitz-Riley crossovers, pink-noise room measurement, auto delay alignment, a full effects chain — it has to cover Mac and PC setups that can be wildly different. In practice it now replaces a rack of hardware.
Short version: I built it wider for a very practical reason — a crash-prone tool my kid was stuck with — gave it away, and let it grow into the rack I always wanted on a laptop.
And right now it's happening again: I'm building Adelvo Commander, an SFTP client with a local file manager and an AI renaming function — it started as nothing more than a replacement for the WinSCP I run under Wine on my Mac.
That’s a useful retrospective. I’d be interested in continuing the conversation beyond the thread — would you be open to sharing the best email to reach you on?
About
I run a side project building tools for live audio and video production (you may have seen my Directors Plan for vMix post). MixDesk X is the free one: a real mixing console for everything your computer plays and records
3 Comments
I'm curious what rebuilding taught you that the first launch didn't. Was there anything about how people evaluated MixDesk X that challenged one of your original assumptions about what they actually cared about?
Thanks — good question.
Honestly, the rebuild didn't start as a strategy. My daughter was using an ASIO-based utility to put an EQ on her mic — clunky GUI, and it kept crashing and causing problems. I wanted to give her something that just stayed up, and I wanted it on Windows, so I rebuilt the whole thing in Go to go cross-platform. The first version had been macOS-only and paid; at that point I figured — so what, give it away for free.
Then, like Directors Plan for vMix, it ran a bit past its original scope. It's basically become a software version of the dbx DriveRack — the loudspeaker-management box I used to lean on as a Swiss-army knife back in my messy fixed-install days. That's where the presets, effects and the measurement side come from: Linkwitz-Riley crossovers, pink-noise room measurement, auto delay alignment, a full effects chain — it has to cover Mac and PC setups that can be wildly different. In practice it now replaces a rack of hardware.
Short version: I built it wider for a very practical reason — a crash-prone tool my kid was stuck with — gave it away, and let it grow into the rack I always wanted on a laptop.
And right now it's happening again: I'm building Adelvo Commander, an SFTP client with a local file manager and an AI renaming function — it started as nothing more than a replacement for the WinSCP I run under Wine on my Mac.