A Bug Saved the Company

I'd expect that the 15-minute nag screen prompted users when they were most enthusiastic about the app and therefore most inclined to purchase. After 15 days, your initial interest may have waned, or maybe you even completed whatever recording you needed to do in the first place.

A bunch of users who reinstalled the app every 15 days thought "oops devs figured out my trick, now I can't fool them so easily guess better buy it"

Indeed. Windows has had a Sound Recorder since 3.1, and it's possible to record the currently playing audio if you select the right input (usually named "Stereo Mix" or similar.)

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/sound

For the past like 30 years I feel there's never been a time some commercial Mac program hasn't filled a simple niche. I remember someone last year posting a Show HN for an ffmpeg wrapper for Mac with a limited feature that focused on transcoding and made $9k in the first 4 months.

Or in the late 90s when there was a commercial program that allowed OS 9 to show real-time window previews while dragging rather than merely showing the window border outline.

Please see the dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Audio Hijack isn't a recording app. It's an app that allows you to selectively route audio from individual apps to different destinations - audio interfaces and otherwise.

Its built-in recorder is a small part of what the overall app does.

It drives me nuts how quickly people jump on the criticism bandwagon without bothering to look up what the thing they're criticising actually does first.

Well, yeah. Mac developers are some of the most conscientious end-user developers in the world, and Mac users want to reward quality software.

It's become less so lately, but the Mac ecosystem historically was what computing SHOULD be.

I'd say that this a missing feature from macOS that windows has had for 30 years already. I believe apple prohibits it for "security" reasons. But there are a number of open source solutions as well, I mainly use BlackHole:

https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole

It's very "Mac ecosystem" from multiple directions: a paid-for tool that is often free on other platforms, but also a paid-for tool that provides a very nice UX with easier customizability and features than a "small utility/script".

(I don't use Audio Hijack, nor am I in the market for anything like it. But it's obvious from the product page[1] that it's a nice piece of software. I also know that several podcasters I listen to rave about it.)

That's not to say free options don't exist. BlackHole[2] is FOSS.

[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ [2] https://existential.audio/blackhole/

That is a question for those that did not make that small (free?) script, not Rogue Amoeba that solved the problem with a paid for app.

You don't, depending on your audio hardware. If it has a loopback you can just use sox from the command line to record the loop back channels...

Same here - it's one of those it just works apps that has given me a ton of utility for more than a decade, at a reasonable price.

it is the unfortunate truth of the world. It's why I just roll my eyes when I see comments like "nagging reminders mean I'll never buy your product!" Those were probably never going to be customers anyway, they're just finding ways to justify it to themselves.

I'm actually not so sure. Even if 100% of the signups to the new version came from users trying for the first time, the previous version being essentially free could have got the app a lot of publicity in tutorials, recommendations or even just showing more highly rated or higher in the download charts.

All of that could increase discoverability of the version with only 15 minutes free trial, so it would be essentially trading sales for advertising.

That said, 2 weeks evaluation on a tool you might use only once effectively means it's just free. Those who might have a need say once a month might just uninstall and reinstall it, and feel completely justified because they didn't get their 15 days, only one day.

I think more than anything it reflects on the fact that most people don't need to record audio all that often. If the product is fine, but you've done all the recording you need, why would you buy it. I would wager that most users never even saw the trial end nag screen simply because they didn't need to open the app anymore.

I'm sure this is some MBA 101 stuff, but I'm slowly learning that all sales come from a sense of urgency.

A two-week long trial ends and you're not even on the computer? Oh well.

You're recording something longer than 15 minutes that you want completed _right now_ and the only way is to upgrade? Instant purchase.

That doesn't mean that urgency has to come from a place of in-authenticity. In this case, I think the trial time limit is fair. People still get real value (actually for even longer than just two weeks), but if you want the full-offering you have to pay for it. It's a decent balance.

Audio Hijack is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. Your takeaway is misguided.

It's much more about aligning the freemium window with the urgency horizon.

A two-week trial won't convert a user that's solved their issue within that window.

I see you weren't around when such shareware was the norm.

With a two weeks trial, the effort to reset the app whenever the restriction popped up was minuscule, hence nobody paid money for it.

What always happens with me is that I'll install the plugin, activate its trial ( as part of the installation process in my mind), then completely forget to get around to testing it until the trial is up.

I know it kind of falls under "user error," but I really wish these plugins had a metered trial period. Like 8 hours of actual usage instead of starting the clock from the time of activation.

Probably. I use a lot of trial and free software 1 - 3 times in a single week. I love that its an option. But if everyone forced me to pay I would probably have to.

So it seems; there's a lot of software you only use incidentally, I suspect this one was right in that spot. Like, once a year or so I need to clean up my hard drive; do I buy a license for a disk usage visualizer, or do I pass because I only use it once? If there's a timed demo I can do my task and forget about it again.

It's more like for many people the software is a solution to a temporary problem ("job to be done", in a recent MBA fad phrase). Once you get the job done, satisfied or not your need to buy Audio Hijack is diminished.

I believe this goes hand in hand with certain types of customers. Purchasing software is often a long-term decision, but many people only need it once. In 15 days, they can complete one or two projects and then forget about it. With a 15-minute limitation, however, you are effectively encouraging them—assuming the quality of your product matches the price—to purchase the software.

So customers were satisfied anyway, but because of the bug their satisfaction did not last enough:-)

It's more complicated than that. People have the highest intent for a product early on (ie, at the moment they sign up). That is when they are most likely to pay, and by paying, they make a commitment and invest the time to get value back out of the product.

A free trial gives them a chance to waffle, and usually by the end of the trial they have haven't put in the effort to decide they want to buy the product, so they don't. Paying earlier also creates a commitment bias.

I've seen this over and over again in products. You want to give people enough usage that they can have confidence the product is worth paying for, but not enough time that they waffle.

Do you own anything Apple, because few bucks for app is nothing, if you just spend several hundreds bucks for monitor stand or RAM. :)

Just last week I wanted to add some VST Effects to my microphone input on Windows like I do on my Mac. Basically just an EQ and Compressor. With SoundSource this is - as you said - pretty easy. On Windows I've tried Virtual Audio Cable and was initially confused by the Banana and Potato version. Also it required a separate VST Host, something that SoundSource has implemented. In the end my setup worked by using Virtual Audio Cable, routed my microphone into FL Studio into my effect chain and then from FL Studio back into the system so each application gets the microphone with effects. I also tried Minihost Modular as a VST Host but that does not support VST3 and in the end I just gave up because sometimes it was far too complicated

> To give a bit of context; I can sit in a Teams meeting using compressors and saturators and whatnot to make the audio better and put any amount of VST plugins in the chain on my own microphone.

DJ Screw has joined the meeting

You know what I really love about MacOS? Every time I pair my bluetooth headphones it defaults the microphone to that sound input. Can you disable that microphone like in Windows? Nope.

I use SoundSource because without it digital audio has audio levels locked, which is also asinine. We have to admit, audio control on Macs is straight up garbage, and having to buy third party tools to do something the other major OS does out of the box is not a good look.

Perhaps not in the same vein, as it's been quite some years, however, I recall using kX Audio A LOT in my Windows days to fiddle with audio/DSP on my SB/Audigy hardware.

>I can sit in a Teams meeting using compressors and saturators and whatnot to make the audio better and put any amount of VST plugins in the chain on my own microphone.

trivial and free with https://equalizerapo.com

This was the case when there was only MME. With something like a Voicemeter and Audacity you can have similar setup. I was able to have voice call on Messenger and simultanously stream it to the Facebook using OBS.

But it's very clunky, that's true.

Make sure to check for potential problems while using the SoundSource trial if you have any "professional" audio system extensions installed. I have Dante Virtual Soundcard and a few others (I do live keyboard performance with my M1 Pro macbook), and SoundSource yields intermittently glitchy audio for me when using it casually to multiplex a few simple sources/destinations (Music, browser, bluetooth speakers). Core Audio is a very complicated piece of technology, so it's also very possible the issue is on Apple's side, or in the "pro" extensions themselves.

(That's as of now -- August 2025 -- so it's possible in the future this issue will be resolved. Don't take this as necessarily true if you're reading this in 2026 or beyond.)

so playing with Audio Hijack, it seems my "Airplay" audio output is *only* present in the interface if I'm currently choosing "Airplay" as my default audio output from the system

So basically with Audio Hijack I can do a "hack" which is: - set my laptop to play on Airplay - play some music there - then if I want to listen to something else on my laptop, I have to create an Audio Hijack pipeline to play some other app on my laptop

Obviously I would prefer the reverse: by default play everything on the laptop, and be able to play a specific app on Airplay... but this doesn't seem to be possible because the "Airplay" device "disappears" from the interface as soon as I stop setting it as the default laptop output

  tell application "System Events" to tell process "Control Center"
      repeat with menuBarItem in every menu bar item of menu bar 1
          if description of menuBarItem as text is "Sound" then
              set soundMenuBarItem to menuBarItem
              exit repeat
          end if
      end repeat
      
      click soundMenuBarItem
      
      repeat with currentCheckbox in every checkbox of scroll area 1 of group 1 of window "Control Center"
          set deviceId to value of attribute "AXIdentifier" of currentCheckbox
          set deviceName to text 14 thru -1 of deviceId
          if deviceName as string is equal to "DEVICE NAME" then -- DEVICE_NAME is the name of your airplay audio device in control center.
              click currentCheckbox
              click soundMenuBarItem
              exit repeat
          end if
      end repeat
  end tell

   tell application "Airfoil"
       set safariSource to make new application source
       set application file of safariSource to "/Applications/Safari.app"
       set current audio source to safariSource

       set aSpeaker to (first speaker whose name is "INSTANCE_NAME") -- Paste the Airplay speaker's instance name here
       if not (connected of aSpeaker) then
           connect to aSpeaker
       else
           disconnect from aSpeaker
       end if
   end tell

  dns-sd -B _airplay._tcp

I like your line of reasoning and you may be right. But as a user I'll probably try a few of the free trial competitors to see if they do what I want before I put money down. I don't always trust front line customer service and the returns process. Sure, maybe you are the good developer who makes it instant and easy. But maybe you're not and either employ dark patterns to keep me in place or don't respond to me at all to return my money. Then I have to consider if the cc charge back process is worth my time and hassle.

Is there already an escrow style middleman?

Want a program, give the middleman some money, get the product.

Within whatever trial period, tell middleman you don't like it, they refund you, program stops working.

Post trial period, money goes to developer.

Provided middleman looks more trustworthy than developer or end user, both win. Roughly what lawyers do in the real world.

If that's not a product already, someone is going to make a killing out of creating it.

A data point of one but for me (a couple years ago).

When I was offering a paid app for 2€ on the AppStore I got less than a hundred customers. A free app with a 2€ IAP resulted in a couple of thousand of purchases.

Note also that the free version of the app didn’t have ads or anything, just slightly less functionality. The IAP arguably unlocked only minor features.

My point is: users put zero value on most programs. They will almost always choose a free alternative if it provides them the bare minimum of functionality

Now, with highly professional software like Rogue Amoeba’s things might be different.

As a prospective buyer, I'm not much swayed by a promise of returns. I never know how easy it's going to be. It might be promised that it's quick and easy, then turn out to be a giant pain. There might be terms hidden in the fine print that I missed. I might have to (the horror) talk to a human, which is not what I want when buying software.

I've been buying this sort of software since it was called "shareware" and was obtained on floppies or downloaded over XMODEM from a local BBS. I made a living from it for a long time. The fact that almost nobody has done it this way should indicate it's not as good as it sounds. (The App Store may work this way in practice, but the stated terms are that you request a refund and then it might be granted, at the discretion of Apple. They also explicitly state that requests might be refused for "abuse" which is not defined, and could very well include merely getting too many refunds. It can't really be treated as a trial.)

Option 1: they had a minnutes and days funcion and someone typed days and minutes.

Option 2: they chech every 15 minutes if the trial time is over, so an inmediate expiration is notuced 15 days later. And 15 days - 15 minutes is a coincidence.

> Am I the only one who thinks that describing this as a "bug" sounds a bit off?

Yes, you are the only one, because you've misunderstood.

> Most bugs don't come with their own updated alert text. It sounds a bit more like they had planned to switch to a different trial method and enabled it earlier than they expected?

No, the bug was simply that the trial period ended after 15 minutes instead of the intended 15 days.

> Or maybe a "rogue" employee added the feature as an experiment and didn't tell anybody?

There were no employees. At the time this happened, the company consisted entirely of the 3 cofounders. In fact the bug, that is, the shortened trial period, is what allowed the company to grow and hire employees, although the company is still relatively small.

I think the alert text was supposed to only appear starting after 15 days. The bug was that this limitation began immediately.

Possible, but they almost certainly had functionality to automatically convert from a number of seconds to text like “15 minutes” for rendering.

Not only that, but if the trial works that way, you can repeat it any time you need to record something. The app probably dropped a prefs file somewhere (the old-style Mac XML preferences files), delete that and go again.

This would actually be easier than just paying.

I'd have loved for the article to explore such reasons.

I recommend "Alchemy" by Roy Sutherland. [0] It deals with human and behavior that drive economics and highlights ideas that would fail on paper and actually work. Example, turns out you can use Disney like characters painted on the outside of a store to reduce brake-ins at night.

It goes through similar scenarios. Example, "Offering a free version and not requiring a credit card can push the idea that your solution has no value so why should I use it?"

[0] https://bookbrief.io/books/alchemy-rory-sutherland/summary

This ones actually hard to believe. Did you guys actually track the user signups?

I would bet its the "zombie, forgetful, monthly Saas payments" like you're saying, not a decline in actual signup/use

The way I read it, the first dialog showed up the first time you launched the app, and never had the Purchase button. The idea was that 15 days later, you’d see the second dialog (after 15 minutes of recording). Due to the bug, however, the second dialog showed up after 15 minutes of recording from day 1.

The second dialog was always shown (and presumably always had the purchase button), but the difference was between whether users got 15 full free days first or not.