Hey,
Jake here (one of the course creators)
I’m no longer working at Output or Kadenze but someone did forward your messages on to me.
Sorry you’ve had a bad experience with the course. While I believe a lot of true beginners with no familiarity with JUCE or signal processing would disagree with you, I definitely see and agree with your concerns, namely around not using std::unique_ptrs in the intro lessons.
Unfortunately the course was made many years back and created in a pretty turbulent time with the JUCE API changing and the entire framework shifting from ScopedPointer classes to std::unique_ptrs.
Later in the course ScopedPointer are introduced but they’re now also deprecated so it’s not much help.
Anyways without getting into a disagreement with semantics, your concerns have been heard and I’ve spoken with the team about what we could do to update the course content to reflect JUCE 6 as well as 2020 practices.
This course has helped many hundreds of people go from zero to building their first plugins – and while it certainly won’t teach you how to code things to the scale we do at Output, it will give people a very fun and educational primer without math to get started on plugins in an inviting way. Something which when this came out – really didn’t exist online.
In any case please send the refund request directly to Kadenze and not Output and I appreciate your feedback! I’ll try to get it updated.
Best,
Jacob