After much thought, I have decided to cease work on Osplay and Practice Makes Perfect due to poor revenues. I will fix critical bugs, but there will be no new features.
After much thought, I have decided to cease work on Osplay and Practice Makes Perfect due to poor revenues. I will fix critical bugs, but there will be no new features.
Hi, I think it is a pitty you will stop developing those programs. I am a dancer and need to prectice a lot outside the dance studio. I will actually go out and buy an Android phone to get access to the excellent speed regulation features. I think there are thousands of potential user outhere that really needs those apps. I will recomend them to all I know.
If I can make a which for an additional feature it will be to set the max and min speeds yourself in the settings. I need very small but presice speed settings. Br Dan
Working a conventional job pays about 20 times what I’m making off of Osplay and Practice Makes Perfect combined. If there is a sustained and sustainable 20-fold increase in daily sales, or a 4000-fold increase in ad clicks on the free version, I will continue development, but I am not willing to invest anything further for the possibility that increase will occur.
I’m really bummed to hear that. I’ve been using Osplay on my Android (Samsung Mesmerize) and I really like it, but I would love it if there was a way to sync the play count with iTunes so that it would update which podcasts I’ve listened to already.
I’m sorry to hear you’re discontinuing. It’s a very cool little tool for musicians, it just needs more development. After all, what is it, v. 1. something? I can appreciate the amount of time it takes to develop, and you may have other priorities in your life. But something like this takes time to get established. At a minimum you should investigate whether you can sell it to a more established development company with more resources to put into it. Have you done any guerilla – type marketing to get the word out? The sectionizer interface isn’t too intuitive, but after watching your video it became pretty easy to use. Sound quality isn’t too good when you slow down a song, but I slow it down in another program (Goldwave) and then import it.
I don’t usually take time to write in forums like this, but I’m just sorry to see a cool little tool like this fall by the wayside. Good luck to you.
I put out the first version of Practice Makes Perfect in March 2010. That version was ad-supported, which has brought in incredibly little. I put out a paid version in late September 2010, which has brought in an unreasonably low amount for the effort that went into it. Add in Osplay, and the statement still stands (though its sales are stronger). It is nice that I can continue to generate revenue by sales on the existing products without any further effort, but at this point I’m looking at an 18-year timeline before I’ve made up my opportunity cost, and that assumes sales are constant. I doubt very much that sales are going to be constant for the next 18 years. That payoff also assumes no further effort whatsoever.
I’ve posted on forums, bought AdMob and Google ads, reached out via Twitter, created a Facebook page, and promoted in-person. I’m out of ideas, and forced to conclude this isn’t a sufficiently large market to sustain a business or that I am incapable of reaching that market. My priority is to be able to pay my bills, and Osplay and Practice Makes Perfect aren’t going to do it at their current price point (and I doubt people are going to pay $50 for either one, which is the price point I would have to operate at, without seeing any decrease in sales, to be profitable). At one point I believed that if I were to issue eight more programs of comparable sales, I would be okay, but based on what I’ve seen I would then sink under the weight of support costs.
Sound quality is largely a factor of the WSOLA settings. I picked ones that made it tolerable on a G1, so it wouldn’t skip at all. Mess with the WSOLA settings inside of Preferences; larger overlap and seek window will give better sound quality (to a point; set them too big and the track will not be able to calculate far enough in advance and will pause for a noticeable amount mid-play) and smaller sequence will give better sound quality (again, to a point).
Again, if sales increase sufficiently to cover my regular expenses in a sustained and sustainable way, I’d gladly continue work, but given that I wasn’t able to make that happen while actively trying to drive sales, I have no reason to expect this to happen when I have officially ceased development.
Thanks for the effort you did put in. Sad to see the business case not work out, but certianly understand the decision. Also thanks for the guidelines on the WSOLA settings, as the help website did not cover those, and the are developer lingo rather than user lingo. I hope you find a way to sell the Intellectual Property or license development to someone to carry the project forward. Thanks again.
It’s my sincere hope that no one ever has to touch the WSOLA settings. Unfortunately, there’s too much variance in systems to stick to just one set of values, so I added support to tweak them. You can make things sound really bad by tweaking them too much, so I don’t want to encourage their use; but when they’re needed, they’re sorely needed.
I discovered Osplay tonight in my search for a way to play podcasts at high speed. I was excited about Osplay but sorry to see that development has ceased. Perhaps someone can answer a question for me. I want to play podcast mp3’s on my Android phone directly from the Google Reader app. But when I click on the little speaker icon, the only apps I’m offered are Media Player (standar with Android) and DoubleTwist (which I downloaded). Can I get Osplay to play these files? Many thanks.
I discovered Osplay tonight in my search for a way to play podcasts at high speed. I was excited about Osplay but sorry to see that development has ceased. Perhaps someone can answer a question for me. I want to play podcast mp3’s on my Android phone directly from the Google Reader app. But when I click on the little speaker icon, the only apps I’m offered are Media Player (standar with Android) and DoubleTwist (which I downloaded). Can I get Osplay to play these files? Many thanks in advance.
If Google Reader is firing an ACTION_VIEW Intent, Osplay should be there. Download the trial and see if it shows up in the list; I would expect it to.