Does Coding Matter Anymore? Audio Programming in the AI Age w/ Sinan Bokesoy (Sonic Lab) | Ep 39

Wojciech Ozimek spent almost 2 years shipping Pro Tools on Avid's technical program management team, working with the Avid Inner Circle plugin ecosystem. Today he runs Audio Product Academy, a course platform and meetup community for the business side of audio, and Augmented Pipelines, which helps audio and entertainment brands adopt agentic AI. Wojciech joins Josh to talk about using AI the right way. His argument: audio is a small market with tight margins, and AI agents can give indie plugin developers and small audio companies capacity they could never afford to hire, but only on top of skills they already have. Along the way: open-source firmware and hardware as a platform, what vibe-coded clones of Pro Tools and FL Studio leave out (support is part of the product), why Josh refuses free work, AI silos inside teams, and the fundamentals of building your first agent: a clear goal, a master prompt, memory files, and respecting the context window. Plus his closing advice: get up from the computer and go watch your customers work. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:22 Origin story: bands, product management, and Avid 03:58 How the Audio Product Academy podcast and meetups started 06:32 A community for the business side of audio 10:33 What he's hearing across the industry right now 12:18 Open-source firmware and hardware as a platform 15:01 Value still wins in a flooded market 18:08 Josh: things go free, then standards return 22:22 Business models: hardware platforms vs. software 25:09 Vibe-coded clones and the 3 layers of a product 27:59 Open source and who does the work 30:44 QA, customers, and who can live with bugs 34:05 Never update mid-project, and a Saturday-night bug 36:51 Support is a promise 38:54 Why Josh pays people properly 43:10 Value, pricing, and what customers don't see 46:39 Guarantees have to be sustainable 48:27 Agentic AI as a lifeline for small audio companies 52:23 Josh: how I feel is irrelevant 55:50 Dr. Mix, and setting out to prove AI was rubbish 58:14 The software legends of the future 1:01:43 New instruments from outside the box 1:03:19 Full Metal Ninja, Method Man, and why taste still matters 1:07:08 Rip-offs, record labels, and the honest VC 1:09:44 Friction is part of the creative process 1:13:16 Josh: building the first plugin as a team 1:14:56 AI silos and shared agent memory 1:17:10 Living SOPs and Josh OS 1:19:53 The course: building your first agent for product work 1:27:16 Format, price, and who it's for 1:31:55 Tools: VS Code, Claude Code, and a guardrail agent 1:33:52 Wrap-up, and a product management course coming in November 1:37:14 Get out of the chair and watch your customers Links • Audio Product Academy: https://audioproductacademy.com/ • Building Your First AI Agent (course): https://audioproductacademy.com/courses/building-your-first-ai-agent/ • Augmented Pipelines: https://augmentedpipelines.ai/ • The Audio Programmer community: https://theaudioprogrammer.com/community Guests: Wojciech Ozimek (Audio Product Academy)

Simon Weis builds audio plugins at night. By day he's a PhD physicist writing automotive and CAD software; after hours he runs Dark Palace Studios, the synthwave-flavoured plugin label behind Sloth (a physics-inspired slew-rate limiter), an all-pass filter suite, a multiband clipper, and Parrot — the multimodal delay that took 3rd place in the KVR Developer Challenge. Simon joins Josh to talk about building a plugin company as a side business and loving it: €20 "democratized" pricing with no Black Friday discounts, shipping with no DRM and full Linux builds, newsletter-first marketing, and a refreshingly candid take on where LLMs actually help (renaming, CI scripts, slide decks) and where they fall apart (C++/JUCE/DSP, where he reckons there just isn't enough training data). Along the way: why he rewrote JUCE's graphics in OpenGL for high-refresh UIs, how Signalsmith's permissive DSP libraries ended up inside Parrot, and why the joy of creation isn't going anywhere — "it's not the end, it's the beginning." Chapters 00:00 Intro — "Dr. Laguna" & Dark Palace Studios 02:19 Origins: synthwave, COVID & meeting the Vital UI designer 06:43 Building the team & marketing with Maxime 08:12 Why running a plugin label as a side business is an advantage 09:04 Choosing plugin ideas: Sloth, the all-pass suite & Parrot 14:35 Pricing philosophy: €20 and no Black Friday 18:50 Why Dark Palace ships no DRM 23:35 Breaking through the noise: UI & owning your newsletter 27:21 Do AI plugin-builders threaten indie devs? 30:45 LLMs for audio DSP: 80% miss, 20% hit 40:02 Parrot & the KVR Developer Challenge (3rd place) 46:01 Signalsmith, permissive licensing & API design 52:05 JUCE, CLAP in v9 & custom OpenGL graphics 58:04 Moonlighting: balancing a day job and a plugin label 1:01:41 Iterative updates & valuing customer feedback 1:07:17 The joy of creation AI can't reproduce 1:15:25 Not the end — the beginning 1:16:12 Wrap-up & Moonbase shout-out Links • Dark Palace Studios — find Simon's plugins on Moonbase • Moonbase (episode sponsor, e-commerce for plugin sellers) — https://moonbase.sh • The Audio Programmer & our Discord community — https://www.theaudioprogrammer.com Guests: Simon Weis (Dark Palace Studios)

Future Audio Workshop founder Gavin Burke joins The Audio Programmer to talk about what it takes to sell audio plugins in 2026. Gavin has been building plugins since 2005: modeling the Jupiter-8 and Prophet V as one of Arturia's first employees, serving as CTO at Output during Arcade, and releasing Circle, SubLab (the best-selling instrument on Plugin Boutique) and now Notes. We get into why pitching Notes as "a new way to play chords" missed and how customer feedback is reshaping it, why he held off on Claude Code until it fixed a months-old macOS bug in five minutes, why his team doesn't write unit tests, paid ads vs. influencers and the new manager layer, what he'd do in a plugin's first 30 days, Serum 2's free upgrade and Unreasonable Hospitality, and why Circle 2 was his real "difficult second album." Guests: Gavin Burke (Future Audio Workshop)

Sonic Lab founder Sinan Bokesoy joins The Audio Programmer to ask whether coding still matters when AI agents can write it for you. After 15+ years of building audio plugins, Sinan now has Claude, Codex and Gemini write most of his code, yet his latest instrument still took 18 months, because the AI can't hear. We get into his real workflow: prototyping ideas before porting them to JUCE, cross-validating AI models to catch bugs, running Unity 3D visuals inside JUCE with WebView, why one-prompt, vibe-coded plugins aren't real products, the true cost of building with AI, and what new audio developers still need to learn. An honest look at audio development in the AI age. Guests: Sinan Bokesoy (Sonic Lab)

Karanyi Sounds founder Dani Karanyi joins The Audio Programmer to break down what actually sells audio plugins, and why most never do. We get into pricing and why you cannot win the race to the bottom, the marketing funnel behind a real plugin brand, why email quietly out-earns every other channel, a candid take on piracy and DRM, building an audience from day one, and where AI still falls short in plugin design. A refreshingly honest look at the business behind the plugins. Guests: Dani Karanyi (Karanyi Sounds)

Josh sits down with Max Shafer, co-founder of Just for Noise, on building an AI foundation model for drum and sample generation. Max shares the origin story — from a drum machine that wouldn't turn on and 20 minutes lost hunting for a single kick, to reframing the problem as generating samples on the fly. We get into designing an intuitive interface beyond the "empty prompt box," building a proprietary dataset by ripping drum machines in studios across LA, New York, Berlin and London, and the pivot from plugin company to a licensable infrastructure/API layer. Max also opens up on the funding journey — contacting ~170 investors over three months at roughly a 1-in-100 yes rate — why he preferred VCs over angels, and his candid caution that raising isn't right for every company. Plus the music-tech landscape, community-driven beta testing born in the Audio Programmer Discord, and how AI can support rather than replace the creative process. Guests: Max Shafer

Inside Google & Samsung's open source spatial audio project, Eclipsa Audio. Jani Huopinen (Product Lead, Eclipsa Audio at Google), Scott Kramer (Founder, Greenfield Sound; former Netflix Sound Director), and Klaus Trelby (immersive music engineer/producer, Marshmallow Skies) discuss how IAMF — the royalty-free immersive audio format from the Alliance for Open Media — is bringing spatial audio to YouTube, Android, Chrome, and beyond. Topics include the Eclipsa DAW plugin, comparisons with Dolby Atmos, dual audio for dialogue control, the film/TV pipeline, and what success looks like for open source immersive audio. Guests: Jani Huopinen, Scott Kramer, Klaus Trelby

What does it actually take to get your audio plugins up and selling? In this episode, Josh sits down with Tobias Madsen from Moonbase to talk about the business side of plugin development - the part most developers find harder than the code. Tobias shares his journey from building plugin stores and licensing systems for companies like Yum Audio and Black Salt Audio, to turning all of that experience into Moonbase - a platform now powering over 200 audio software businesses. They cover the real challenges of selling plugins, what a modern business stack looks like for plugin developers, and where things are heading next. Guest: Tobias Madsen (Moonbase - https://moonbase.sh) More at theaudioprogrammer.com

How do you actually get started with DSP? Josh sits down with Sam Fischmann, technical co-founder of Musik Hack, for a wide-ranging conversation on practical Digital Signal Processing - what it is, where to begin, and how to build audio software with clear, expressive controls that don't require a doctorate to use. Sam makes products for artists, musicians, producers, and audio engineers at Musik Hack, where the philosophy is to keep the user experience simple even when the underlying signal processing is complex. Guest: Sam Fischmann (Musik Hack - https://musikhack.com) More at theaudioprogrammer.com

Join the ADC team as they discuss the 10th anniversary conference featuring 85+ speakers, new game audio track, expanded diversity initiatives, and global expansion to cities worldwide. Registration and more info: https://audio.dev