Rekord Buddy is now free.

The restrictive walled garden approach to library management benefits only the industry. It’s nothing more than a way to tie paying customers to their respective products, and offers no real feature advantage, nor does it encourage the innovation our industry badly needs.

I find this approach to be unacceptable, which is why I made Rekord Buddy.

This has been a passion project over many years. It was the first to market and enjoyed enough success that I could make it my full time gig. But recently I’ve been struggling with something, and that’s how my beliefs conflict with my actions. By selling Record Buddy as a product and then as a service, I’m profiting from the poor practices of the DJ industry, albeit in a bid to provide a solution to this bad practice.

That ends today.

As of today, October 9th 2020, Rekord Buddy is a free app and will become open source software before the end of the year, free for anyone to use and modify as they wish. Without revenue, I’ll continue to support and develop it more as a labour of love, but user support will minimal and sporadic. Rekord Buddy did what it set out to do. What happens next is up to you. Join me and let’s make it fulfil it’s motto and stay the one and only “By DJs, for DJs” app out there.

Here is a quick FAQ. I’ll be adding more to this as we go along:

What does this mean for the commercial builds of the app?

They are deprecated, no longer work and are no longer supported. The company behind them, Next Audio Labs, no longer exists.

Where are the free builds of Rekord Buddy?

You can find the free macOS build here and the free Windows build here. These builds are beta and will remain beta until we have time to finish adding all their features and make sure they are stable enough.

There is an issue with the builds, what can I do?

Bugs and development issues are handled in the github repo for the project. The old support forums have been now closed. If someone in the community is interested in running user support forums, you can open a ticket on github and we will go from there.

Where is the online manual?

It's been replaced by a PDF copy while we move the content over to github.

Can I download the free build if I’m already a commercial user?

Yes but first you will need to migrate your collection to the format used by the free build.

How do I migrate my collection if I'm a commercial user?

Glad you asked. There is a beta build currently available that will do the work for you. If you feel like helping out the project, backup your Rekord Buddy folder (in ~/Music/RekordBuddy) and give that build a try.

What does that mean for people who bought licenses last year/last month/yesterday, do they get their money back?

No. I wish Rekord Buddy generated enough money for me to have a huge stack of cash that I could redistribute to everyone but that’s sadly not the case. Money coming in paid for the expenses of that month so it’s not something I’ll be able to do. If that helps, keep in mind that while some of you may be upset at virtually ‘loosing’ $49 dollars because the app is now free, I am very much giving away a lot of money here by giving back this entire app to the community.

Will Rekord Buddy still support Engine or other programs?

Absolutely. Development is still being made on those and the plan is still to add Engine support and Apple Music app support before 2.2 ships.

Can I donate to help development?

Not at this time. What is needed is help from people, not financial help. If you really want to give back a little bit then tell your friends about my podcast Damien Plays Records. It's my passion project and I can always do with more listeners :)

What kind of help do you need for the future?

I will need help with moving the manual to the github wiki (probably). I need help testing the app and I need help coding it to add new features. If you can help with any of these things, stay tuned. The github project will be the hub for most of this.

Why are you taking so long to reply? Why don't I have your full attention right now?

Because Rekord Buddy is no longer my full time job. I have a family, I have another job now, I have to deal with a pandemic like we all do. A DJ app is not the most important thing in the world right now.