Some background on Buzz for others: Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
I believe the event you describe is pretty ancient, and Buzz recovered and continued development for many years after. I wrote some plugins for the more recent versions of Buzz, the plugin API was always nice to work with (compared to VST at least!)
Sounds like a tragic case of not making backups, to me. Even if the author used a VCS, when the drive died it would have taken the repo with it all the same.
Actually from 2008 to 2016 there was updates, they sent off the disk to a recovery firm and got a mostly latest copy and built from that. The newer versions used .NET and the main improvment in those builds was a new pattern-system (XP-patterns) so you could make patterns that selected parameters from one or more machines.
So the annoyance of having to work in different patterns when your "instrument" was made out of a chain of discrete modules went away (also useful for making chords from primitive machines since you could hook multiple generators in one pattern).
> Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
Yeah, lemme go ahead and commit this code I've been working on for weeks without creating a repo...
Buzz was so great. I came across it when I learned James Holden produced his early stuff on it and was hooked. It had a good community with hundreds of synths and effects you could download from Buzzmachines. It was such a shame they lost the source code, I’d have loved to see how it developed.
This made me google Buzz and it turns out it was recoded by the author and there was an update in 2022. Not sure if it’s still developed. I’m not on a Windows machine so won’t be able to try it easily unfortunately, wish it was open source so it could be ported to Mac
