Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis, writing on the latest version of their audio recording app, Piezo, and their decision to exit the Mac App Store:

Piezo requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later; you can pick it up for $10 and from either Rogue Amoeba’s site or the Mac App Store. A free trial lets you record up to 10 minutes of audio per launch. Rogue Amoeba has released Audio Hijack 3.6.4 and Piezo 1.6.4, updating the audio recording utilities with a refreshed Audio Capture Engine that contains many backend enhancements and bug fixes related to dealing with aggregate devices. Audio Hijack also receives continued improvements to the tracking of USB audio devices to work around issues.

Rogue Amoeba's Piezo

A major reason for the initial creation of Piezo was our desire to allow recording from other applications on the Mac within the limits of what Apple’s Mac App Store rules allowed. We were pleased to provide audio capture to customers of the Mac App Store, and for a time, things worked just fine. However, Apple eventually changed the rules, requiring that all applications distributed through the Mac App Store be sandboxed. This was a problem. Piezo’s need to capture audio from other applications precludes the possibility of it being sandboxed. This new requirement effectively stopped our ability to upgrade Piezo in any meaningful way.

Piezo
  • Rogue Amoeba announced Wednesday the release of Piezo, an app that can record audio from other Mac software, even apps that have been sandboxed. Armed with a “charmingly simple” interface, to.
  • Piezo 1.6 Though Audio Hijack is aimed at users of all levels, folks are often drawn to our charmingly simple audio recorder Piezo, thanks to its simple, one-click usage. We made many improvements to recording and setup in Piezo 1.6, but most notably, this update fixed two different ways the app’s settings popover could misbehave in amusing.

Piezo App

[…]

Piezo For Mac

We’d like to provide customers with the option of buying Piezo through the Mac App Store, but it’s more important to us that we provide a quality product with full functionality. In the case of Piezo, that now means exclusively distributing the application via our site. Users have always had the option of downloading and buying Piezo direct, so this didn’t involve much in the way of additional work. The biggest issue was simply choosing to remove Piezo from the Mac App Store. Ultimately, we feel the decision was made for us by both technical and bureaucratic factors outside of our control.

Rogue Amoeba Piezo

It says a lot about the Mac App Store that, whenever another app exits it, our reaction isn’t “why” but “of course”.