Apple Buys Redmatica: What it Means for Musicians

Apple buys many companies'¦ So why choose to purchase Redmatica, the developer of Keymap which brought powerful sampling features to digital musicians? Toby Pitman pieces together a curious puzzle.

If you haven't yet heard the news, Apple have acquired Italian software company Redmatica. This is fairly big news in the world of music software and especially for users of Apple's Logic Pro and Garageband.

Now we've seen Apple buy companies with the view of integrating technologies before and it's not much of a surprise that Redmatica should be on the list. So who are Redmatica and what do they do (or did they do!)?

Founded by Andrea Gozzi Redmatica made a rather useful tool called Keymap Pro (amongst others). The software was essentially geared towards the creation of sampler instruments. To put it lightly, Keymap Pro was (and still is) one of the most useful and clever pieces of software on the market if you're into sampling.

Armed with a ton of audio files from a sampled instrument, you could pretty much drop them into Keymap Pro and it would seamlessly map, loop, velocity layer every sample and export this to every major software sampler format in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Basically it is nothing short of incredible!

Alas now it would seem this is the end of Keymap Pro! Or is it?

What Now?

As of the June 2nd the Redmatica website is no longer accessible. All it shows is a message from Andrea:

Dear Redmatica Customer,

After eight wonderful years of developing creative sampling tools, I have decided to close Redmatica to pursue other interests. Thank you for all your patronage!

Andrea Gozzi, Founder





There follows some instructions on how to download the latest updates. I found out about all this (as did every Redmatica customer) via an email that contained this message and some serial numbers for the latest and last update.

Customers who bought Redmatica products from the Apple Store were advised to backup their version of the apps. This isn't boding well for the customer base!!





Good News, Bad News

So what does this mean? Well it could mean a couple of things, and depending where you bought the software it could mean a lot!

If you purchased the software from the Apple Store it's possible that Apple might develop the software further (Apple Keymap Pro?) and you'll continue to be able to update via the App Store. But what if you bought it via the Redmatica site?

Am I going to have to re-purchase the software if it continues? With Gatekeeper (part of Apple's OS X Mountain Lion) on the horizon, it's possible I might have to! That would really suck!

There is also (and probably inevitable) chance that the product will cease to exist altogether.





Logic Integration?

There is a very good chance that we'll see Keymap Pro and Auto Sampler integrated into Logic Pro X and even Garageband. But will it be as fully fledged as the original and will it export to the competition? Kontakt, Reason or Pro Tools!!

Depending on how they work this, it could be the coolest thing ever, or a total disaster! I'm hoping for the former.

Either way I honestly wish Andrea all the best for the future. He came up with an awesome bit of kit and I hope he was rewarded for his hard work by Apple.

I just hope the existing customer base isn't ignored by Apple and they go on to do it the justice it deserves. This is something I (and many other music professionals, both freelance and sample companies) use to get the job done. Yes, it's complex, but then sampling is a complex business. Please don't dumb it down Apple!



