HISE – Audio Dev School

I was first introduced to Moonbase by their co-founder, Tobias, over a year ago and I've been set on switching to it ever since. Moonbase describes itself as an operating system for audio software companies. They provide payment processing, global tax handling, file hosting, and product, licence, and customer management, along with marketing tools and many other features. For over 10 years I've used my own system built from a mish-mash of Wordpress, WooCommerce, PayPal, Stripe, Amazon, and a bunch of other Wordpress plugins and server-side scripts. So Moonbase appeals to me for three main reasons: Simplicity: Almost everything I'm doing currently is spread across an inconsistent web of dependencies. From payment processing, to product delivery, and license management. Switching to Moonbase is going to bring all this under a single system, greatly reducing my admin burden and increasing operational reliability. Reduced Cost: Wordpress plugins, payment processing, file delivery, etc. all add up. Having a big chunk of my requirements handled by Moonbase at the low price they charge is going to reduce my overheads considerably. Tax Handling: As software developers we are able to sell to a global market easily, but this comes with a heavy admin burden, sales tax. Each country in the EU has their own tax level, different US states have their own tax requirements, and most other countries again have different requirements. Managing all this is an admin nightmare. There are services you can use to make it a little easier, but they're expensive and often still require you to make fillings yourself. Moonbase is a Merchant of Record which means they take care of all the sales tax collection and renitence for us, making sure we're fully compliant no matter where our customers are based. At the time of writing I've finally started taking the first steps to transition to Moonbase. Currently I'm setting up a new website to play with the integration. My original plan was to use a static website built with Hugo or similar, but after looking into it I'm too lazy to learn a new system. So I'm sticking with Wordpress and WooCommerce, using Woo just for the product management and catalog display. The cart, checkout, and user accounts are handled by Moonbase's embedded storefront. The integration so far is working out pretty easy. In WooCommerce I set the products to be external, and I add a link for each one that uses the Moonbase add to cart action along with the Moonbase product ID. In the website header I've added a cart icon which pulls in the items-in-cart count from Moonbase and when clicked triggers the Moonbase show cart action. And I've added a user account button which triggers the Moonbase user account action. The next thing I need to test is webhooks from Moonbase so that when an order is placed it feeds the data back to my website into my CRM and analytics systems - although Moonbase is working on their own marketing automation system so I might not need this in the future. For the time being I'm removing the downloader from Rhapsody so I don't have to figure out how to integrate that with Moonbase, but I might re-add it in the future. A few weeks ago I was also playing around with Moonbase's licensing system, I don't plan to use it myself but it looks like a great option for those that need such a feature. Moonbase provides a JUCE module that you integrate into your plugin and it will tie to your Moonbase account. When the user runs your plugin it will popup a licensing window, they click a button which opens a web browser, and once they've logged in to their account the plugin is active. They don't have to mess around with serial keys or complicated activation procedures. At the time I'm writing this the Moonbase module requires JUCE 7 or higher, which for us HISE developers means you need to use the juce8 branch of JUCE that's included with HISE. However at the moment HISE won't build with the juce8 branch so we have a little wait until it's fixed. In addition to that I've opened a PR with HISE to make the Moonbase integration super simple. The idea is you add a MOONBASE preprocessor to your project and add the moonbase JUCE module folder to your HISE source code folder. Everything will then magically work. This is still a work in progress, however once the juce8 bugs are fixed I'll finish it and make a tutorial video. Click here if you'd like to see the PR.

Tag: HISE

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