In early January, Camel Audio, maker of the popular music and sound synthesizer Alchemy, has removed access to its software, and all purchase options from its website, following a change of its original headquarters address, to Apple’s London address, 100 New Bridge Street, and the listing of Apple lawyer Heather Joy Morrison as the director of the company.
The hush takeover suggests Apple’s interest in offering more advanced music applications, to integrate within products like Garage Band, or Logic Pro X.
Up until last year, music-making enthusiasts and audio professionals alike, have enjoyed the powerful suit’s impressive range of plugins, including over one thousand sounds, 5.5GB of sample tracks, spectral resynthesis, a virtual analog synthesizer and a powerful additive resynthesis engine, among some of the outstanding features available for $249.
A possible introduction of Alchemy’s features and re-synthesis engine, especially into Logic Pro X, is already building anticipation among fans of both Apple Logic Pro X and Alchemy’s, who might find access to Alchemy’s powerful tools, media library and sounds, for almost $50 less than Alchemy’s former price. Logic Pro X retails currently for $199.99.
There is also the possibility that much of Alchemy’s advanced technology could be broken into bite-size plugins, available for purchase separately from the the main application, which might include the massive library, as well as the sample tracks.
Apple Alchemy 2?
Before Camel Audio shut its doors on January 8th, its plans included what was to be the upcoming release of Alchemy 2, the highly anticipated update to the music making software.
Alchemy fans took it to Reddit and Twitter, expressing their frustration over the sudden shutdown. While the theory of Apple integrating Alchemy’s features into its own products seems the most likely, Alchemy’s existing fanbase could carry some weight in a potential decision by Apple to actually develop Alchemy as a separate application from Logic Pro X entirely.
This scenario is heavily dependent on the size of the fanbase, however it’s unlikely that Apple will reveal any concerning plans in the immediate future, at least not before the next OS X Yosemite update, and certainly not prior to the next Macbook Air Retina 12 inches official announcement.