Welcome to Apollo Studio!

Welcome to the brand new Apollo Studio website! This has been a sort of secret Launchpad project that I've worked on and off on for almost a year now. A lot of hard work, a few false starts, but here we are! It's been a huge effort - we'd like to especially thank vaaski, the primary architect behind the new website; LaunchpadLights for the logo and artwork, and lastly rpg.aleksy for his feedback and help with the project. I'm mat1jaczyyy, and here’s a brief overview of some of our new features only found in Apollo Studio!

New Lightshow engine

Apollo Studio is a standalone editor and live playback engine for Launchpad light effects, inspired by the traditional workflow of Ableton Live. The innovation lies in support for true RGB colors (all 262k of them!), an improved workflow and better resource management.

As a community we've developed countless plugins and solutions for better and easier light effects in Ableton Live, but we mustn't forget it was never designed for light effects as intense as we've taken them to in the recent years and its dated engine simply can't keep up. Apollo Studio solves all the problems we experience every day in Live including the unintuitive workflow, limited color palette, inconsistent undo behavior, differences between Launchpad models, CPU lag, large RAM usage and more; while bringing new and revolutionary features to the table!

Apollo Studio takes full advantage of the multithreading capabilities of modern processors and also allows for adjusting the intensity of the light effects globally, making sure everyone can run all project files as much as their setup can support them. Another new feature is support for creating Virtual Launchpads, allowing you to continue work even if you're away from your Launchpad. Device versioning and compatibility issues are also resolved by making sure all devices used are contained within Apollo, ensuring backwards compatibility for all future versions!

Demonstration

Still in doubt? Here are a few Launchpad covers created by early testers entirely in Apollo Studio, and see for yourself what our software is capable of even when using early, unfinished versions.

Limitations

Apollo Studio is purely a lightshow engine and has no audio capabilities whatsoever. For this reason, it was designed to run alongside Ableton Live which has proven its robustness when it comes to running audio-related tasks. Taking all that load off Live's engine should improve audio quality and input lag, too! Apollo can connect to Live with a special device that unlocks extra features, such as MIDI tutorial passthrough. We can also connect our sampling to the Virtual Launchpad feature we mentioned earlier! We do not support the Launchpad S and other non-RGB models, as they do not fit the true RGB workflow.

Special thanks

You are the people who make Apollo Studio possible.

• vaaski for expressing interest early in the project, even if it didn't work out ultimately; and maintaining the website for the project.
• LaunchpadLights for sparking some bright ideas and designing the logo and artwork for the project.
• rpg.aleksy for keeping me sane while I worked full days without a break.
• Avalonia developers for the only robust cross-platform C# UI framework.
• Michael Dahl for his work on RtMidi.Core, bringing easy cross-platform MIDI communication to C#; and accepting my improvements to his library.
• All other beta testers and the rest of the Launchpad community for helping make Apollo Studio better. By the community, for the community!

Sounds great, I want to try it!

Well, of course you do, it sounds like a Launchpadder's wet dream! Unfortunately, Apollo Studio is not quite ready for public use yet, so we'll have to ask you to be patient and wait a little more. I can assure you it's right around the corner though, so fasten your seat-belts and fly your Launchpad to the moon with Apollo Studio! ☆.。.:*・°☆