Lemur Is Back, With New Subscription-Based Model To Support Long-Term Development

MIDI Kinetics has announced that Lemur – the pioneering touchscreen control application – is now available again.

Originally introduced as a hardware touchscreen controller by JazzMutant, Lemur was reborn as an iPad app in 2011. After a few years of being unavailable, MIDI Kinetics has brought Lemur back.

Lemur lets you build custom touchscreen MIDI controllers, using a deep collection of pre-built ‘widgets’, custom-designed widgets and imported images. Lemur can control up to 8 MIDI ports, for up to 128 channels of high speed MIDI control.

Lemur is available again as a subscription-based app. MIDI Kinetics says that the new model is needed for continued development of Lemur to be sustainable.

“We want Lemur to remain a professional-grade tool, not relegated to the status of a hobby project eventually to be abandoned, and this change will help us achieve that goal,” they note.

Here’s the official video intro:

Pricing and Availability:

Lemur is available now as a free download, with subscription pricing of $12.99/month or $99/year. See the MK site for details and info for existing owners.

43 thoughts on “Lemur Is Back, With New Subscription-Based Model To Support Long-Term Development

  1. Lol TouchOSC is 15 bucks and they’ve constantly supported it! Maaaaan all these subscriptions are just greedy at this point, that’s crazy for an App like this too.

    Antelope audio charging 3K for a compressor you have to subscribe to and then this, which is basically a re-skin of TouchOSC a already heavily supported product that has a one time fee and has insane amounts of support via the community and the company that made it. Like how much more tone deaf can people be when they make this stuff. Like…. NO!

  2. I had the hardware, then bought the iPad app.
    I was happy to see it come back, but not like this. 100 is a lot for an app once, yearly is just out of touch… DOA

      1. Well, I had 1% of hope that this may be a real product. I would buy it..
        And what is more funny: An AI generated keyboard made me more interested than a $100 subscription app. 😀

    1. Though I don’t like them, and avoid them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a subscription model other than that it’s a hassle. You pay while you’re using the software, and when you’re done you stop. It does sort of suppose that you’re supporting software is an evolving work-in-progress.

      Developers can charge whatever they want. It’s an IQ test.

      1. “You pay while you’re using the software”.

        You also pay while you’re not using the software when it’s one of many tools at your disposal and you only need to pull it out every once in a while.

        1. Yea, exactly. Like all my software, there are my regulars, and there are those once-in-a-blue-moon ones. And every so often, there’s a big purge and some just go away.

          Subscriptions just feel weird and odd. But I get that developers are struggling.

          In a way, I’m glad we’re not in a “Spotify-but-for-plugins” world where developers only get paid when software is actually being used. That would suck for them. And I would hate paying some gatekeeping middle man forever.

  3. Sorry but Lemur doesnt have the brand recognition or next gen aura/wow factor it used to have. TouchOSC has been a thing for years now and people have moved on to MPE stuff and soon midi2.0 possibilities and the next interesting stuff.

    This thing is DOA.

  4. Always thought
    Lemur was cool but $100/yr for an app? For devices with planned obsolescence? People do unusual things with their money.

  5. It’s amazing how out of touch with reality these companies are. Whoever made their business plan and thought that this would work obviously is in the wrong job. Did they not notice how it went for Waves and others? I used the original Lemur hardware and app back in the day, and was very glad to hear it was coming back. But there is no way in hell I would pay that kind of money for it, probably not even once for the price of the yearly fee, let alone in a recurring subscription model. There are too many alternatives for this to be worth it. I’ll pass and just watch this greedy company fail.

  6. I remember paying about 30-40€ for the app. And now they assume I’ll pay subscription for their “magnificent” app. No way!

    This is just plain stupidity:
    “We want Lemur to remain a professional-grade tool, not relegated to the status of a hobby project eventually to be abandoned, and this change will help us achieve that goal,”

    There would be no technological advancements if it wouldn’t be for regular Joes buying advanced technology in bulk.

  7. dear audio app devs, READ THE ROOM. it’s not just that it’s subscription, it’s just too expensive for an app that most people don’t use every day, and most people using it make music for enjoyment not for profit. i want to see apps like this succeed, but they would get tons more subs if they did like $3 – $5 a month, now they will get none. i had the same thoughts with VCV, it was ether a $29 sub or nothing, now they have nothing. do $5, or have your users choose the monthly donation based on their use case like Blender. just read the room, it would be sad to see these apps go but they have to be smart about it and not shoot themselves in the foot.

  8. It’s nice that companies that make cool stuff are developing new price models to get paid unfortunately I am less and less willing to use subscriptions because they are usually forgotten about and confusing to disconnect for me

  9. Ferocious capitalism looks to collect the last cent they can from whatever is been left in every single corner of society.. yes, ‘music’ included.. we better get organised and fund and promote real open source platforms and developers collectively before more greedy corporations steal the work left by others. RIP Liine and Lemur.

      1. In fact USERS are indeed forced to subscribe. If they stop, they cannot use it and then are not USERS anymore. So e.g. *I* am not forced and I can walk away, but that’s easy for me, because… I am not a user of this software. If I would be a user, I would feel/be forced.
        So your are argument is invalid. 🙂

  10. to be fair, MIDI Kinetics made some updates of MIDI commands in Lemur 5.7. In future they may also work on the memory limitation of 4.8MB per template, as per a forum post. This is good news.

    Personally, I would pay $20-30 for a year in the first 5.7 phase, and later possibly $2-3 in the months where I would actually use Lemur in a project. That would be alright for me. The new company would get their money, and I could continue using Lemur on modern devices and develop new templates.

    Meanwhile, we can use the Liine Lemur app. Keep your old iPads! And TouchOSC, which has scripting also. Or other apps like MIDI Designer (which I don’t have) or Surface Builder (which is also an AU3 plugin) for simple templates.

    If you want Lemur on modern iPads, further development, I suggest you register to the new forum (it’s the old one from Liine, just a different address. Old members simply have to create a new password) and tell the new owner what you would like to have.

    MIDI Kinetics is a Lemur expert. He used to sell his templates on his website years ago. Maybe he just bought Lemur to have a regular income for his professional templates, and doesn’t need a large user base. But we will see.

  11. Touchosc is the way to go and doesn’t have a overpriced subscription model to enrich themselves for lazy work.

    I didn’t like the subscription model for Logic Pro on iPad either so I stopped paying for it. If it was available for 200,- I would’ve actually payed it. Though after using it I found out how terrible the app is developed. The app, made by a trillion dollar company, is crap when compared to companies that have less than 0,1% of Apple’s budget.

  12. Clearly most folks here really don’t understand the software development business.

    You build an app like Lemur, which at the best of times is going to have a very small user base, and when everyone who buys it has already bought it, the revenue stops flowing in. This de-incentivizes continued development of bug fixes, security patches, and new features.

    With a subscription model, the developer is guaranteed to have a constant flow of income to ensure that the work to do fixes, patches and new features covers the costs of implementation.

    People buy cars…they do not expect cars to have a constant flow of “new features”, but the do expect it with software.

    That all being said, I think $99 a year is pretty darned excessive. Yet, people pay more for each release of, for example, “Ableton Live.” The smart way to do subscription is how the developer of Reaper does it, you pay… get use of the app for around I think three years, then you pay again… if you don’t pay, the app keeps working, but you get no updates/fixes/new features going forward. Are we sure this is not the plan for Lemur???

    Subscription models for a small development shop is not “peak capitolism”, it is “survival over the long term”

    1. people here seem to understand how that works.
      buy 15 year old code,
      make it fit into current operating system,
      dont add anything meaningful,
      charge double the price
      and hold users at gunpoint so they can continue to use it
      isnt it nice 😉

  13. I was very briefly excited to see that Lemur was being given new life. However, I’m sad to see that they’re relying on a subscription model, but also very shocked at the very high price. So yeah, DOA.

  14. As a Lemur user since the original Jazzmutant Ethernet based touchscreen model, it is disheartening to see such an extreme price for an iPad app when alternatives like TouchOSC are substantially more affordable. I’m extremely anti-subscription anyway, but might consider it if the price was $1.99 to, at the most, maybe $3.99 a month. At $99 a year, the Lemur project is likely doomed to go under again until it is sold to someone else and then resurrected yet another time. What a shame…

  15. Subscriptions are the way of the world in software development unless you opt to go open source. You can blame the venture capitalists for this one. Software companies need to show show a revenue stream if they are interested in luring outside investors. Having a large user base of subscribers is the best way to show this. They know that once they’ve got you relying on their software, you are highly likely to keep paying to use it.

    Frankly, I hate this model because it eventually leads to useful software no longer working. Eventually a developer goes away and you can no longer use their product. We haven’t seen a ton of that yet, but we will.

    There should be risk with developing new features. It shouldn’t ride on the coattails of a previous release. Create a good product and people will pay for an upgrade.

    I’ve steadfastly avoided as many subscriptions as possible and will continue to do so. Tell me it is subscription based and I’ll look at other alternative.

    1. Software doesn’t require venture capital. It requires time, a laptop, and wifi.

      I don’t use subscription software either. Subscription software may work well for large companies, but it’s usually a losing proposition for individual users.

  16. I can still use old versions of Live and Reason (and tons of old VSTs) on Windows. Even on macOS I’m still running a version of Logic Pro from several years ago (though 32-bit AUs and VSTs are long dead.)

    iOS is another story because apps break with every yearly iOS revision – which you usually want to install because of critical security fixes.

    I have sympathy for developers given the yearly maintenance burden on iOS, but subscription software just doesn’t work for me.

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