Hey,
im searching for people who are interested in developing audio/midi plugins to share knowledge, tools and everything else whats interesting.
Would be nice if here are some developers

 

Nobody here interested in developing Audio Software? I could barely believe
But hope always dies last

 

Your hope better dies because for lots of reasons we're damning the creators of DAWs and plugins (not you) and reverting back again to the real instruments. Yes, today is the first day of post-DAWism era.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 21, 2016

well I was interested, but I'm extremly busy as it is so I really haven't got any time.

are u familiar with coding? if you are, you should lookup the VST SDK and all articles arround it.

 

So basically ! You are looking for a teacher, or some one to make plugs for you? why not just learn on your own ! Knowledge is power
Be a leader and not a Follower Good Luck

 

asking never hurt anyone, we all could use a push in the right direction.

 

https://www.juce.com/
https://github.com/olilarkin/wdl-ol
http://www.martin-finke.de/blog/

Good luck. You'll have to figure out most of the stuff on your own, anyway. You'd better also know how to do graphics design for UI. Also, good luck with your DSP - it's the trickiest part anyway.

 

Hello m4nu5ic,

I also looking for those people and would like to receive and sharing "more" knowledge.
You can forget the pros, because the most pros are really assholes and would never share knowledge or would give help.
Or you have money and pay for help^^ Money making assholes.

As a ReverseEngineer i also made some small VST with Synthmaker, Synthedit and C++.
Of course only for windows (x86/x64, VST 2.5/3.5). For Reversing it is interesting how things work.
First at all you should read and load the whole VST SDK from Steinberg (old and new ones!).
You can also try synthedit and synthmaker. If you have some c++ basic knowledge you´ll better understand the VST SDK.
And don´t forget to read some tutorials, dsp books and pdfs.

You can also download the source code from "Hermann Seib´s" VST Host.
Just open it and take a look at the code. It may help you also a lil bit.

And last but not least you can reverse some plugins to understanding some things too.

Of course there are also some examples for .NET (jacobi/VST.NET or so), but not really good.
You can let Google search for it "make a vst plugin"...

You should also make the GUI by yourself. It isn´t all rocket science. Okay, DSP is weird.
I made some GUI with Cinema4D and/or Photoshop.

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2016

Music world is overfilled by plugins. If something special innovative like better than kotelnikov, better than equilibrium, restoration plugins without artifacts, linear phase eq without preringing, super loud limiter making 0dB RMS with full saving of transients and without distortions and pumping, true tube,vinyl and tape emulations, pitch shifter without chipmunk or monster voice, true emulations of old sound of 1930-1980, restoration plugins for nonrestorable lost audio, bit restoration (16 to 24 bit with sound improvements) etc. Will be interesting. :DDDDD

 

So you are looking people to exchange knowledge, am I right?.

KVR has a lot of those, but it is like a swamp in where you are trying to find gold that is stuck right at the bottom, and you cannot see it at first look. There is no such thing as a "how to plugin: begginers to complete guide" and you do need to figure a 90% of stuff on your own. The books that are on the market, either leave a big essential part out, or just are incomprehensible for human readers, as if they were trying to put a threshold on the prerequisites so that no normie can really do it. And the ones that take your hand until you are ready to fly by yourself, those don't get you even near the landing point... The fact is that you would be learning 2 seperate and really complicated things alltogheter; that is programming and DSP, and founding the holy grial of books that could teach you both from bottom to top without forcing you to leach your life or to put a shotgun up to your head, is really that.... a holy grial search.

But if you are disciplined enough, and have the time to do it, and the patience to look for (and find) the right sources, the right threads, the right material... then is fully doable... And if you find someone who could help you in that process, better yet.

I would love to say I can be one of those someones... but I'm not even close to track yet, I'm just learning on my one little by little with as much sources from different places I can get and understand

 

Very interested in this myself. Just don't have the time to pursue it at the moment.
Every time I'm using a plugin, and thinking "I wish it could do this or that, shouldn't be hard to implement"

 

https://www.juce.com/
https://github.com/olilarkin/wdl-ol
http://www.martin-finke.de/blog/

This is cross-platform Win/Mac, VST2/VST3/AU/RTAS/AAX. But be prepared to do a lot of searching and trial-and-error by yourself. That's how you learn programming. If you just want to mess around, stick with SynthMaker.

 

First of all -> Thanks for the numerous Replies
I really want to learn the "details" so software like synthmaker is nothing for me i think
Reaktor from Native Instruments looks nice but i think it is also hiding the "real stuff".
At the moment im a little bit struggling between choosing the "right" framework.
Juce and wdl-ol are both very interesting but i cannot really decide which one to choose to code stuff for windows in vst-plugin-format.
Does somebody here have experience with wdl-ol or juce on windows for the vst-plugin-format?

 

@m4nu5ic, do you have any idea about *what* you want to develop?
Choosing an SDK without knowing where you want to go is like buying that sweet little raspberry pi and then trying to find a meaningful application for it, if you know what I mean

 

I do with WDL-OL, because with JUCE you have to either pay them for using it, or you're forced to publish your source code.

 

You can use RackAFX too. That with Will Pirkle's books in hand would be a good start (altho this is the kind of book that I say they take your hand until you can fly). You have 2 books, one about audio effects (he reffers to it as the brown book) and one about synthesizers (blue book), the blue one is more recent and gives you overview of how you would do it in the 3 platforms (RackAFX, VST-SDK, and AU). The forum in Will Pirkle's page is always active and Will answers there many question people have. The page also have an Errata section with various corrections to the books, and an App-Notes section with complementary information and models to the book.

anyway, just an add to the "frameworks list"

 

http://hise.audio/index.php

 

I'd like to interject, if I may.
Without being an asshole, I'd say that in order to become proficient at coding DSP plugins, you really need a solid grounding in Audio Engineering, coupled with a computer science degree and a good level of C++ knowledge, if you want to compete with the big boys.
That said. It is perfectly possible to learn a few things for yourself but if you've never programmed anything before then you really should start at the bottom and learn C. Forget C++ until you've mastered the basics.
GUI programming is a completely different kettle of fish. There are IDE's (integrated development environment) that can help you with it all, including the GUI but they are also a steep learning curve.
Steinberg have some great tutorials to get you going. You could use their pre-made libraries (code) to make your own plugs
Start of with a Gain plugin and then work your way up to a filter.
Are you any good at maths? You need to be. You should also learn to think like a programmer, problem solving.
You should also spend a lot of time reading someone else's code, watching youtube tutorials etc. It's not cheating.
I've dabbled a bit with programming but DSP is a huge subject in itself.
Programming is like learning a foreign language. You need to keep studying it every day, else you'll forget.
Be prepared to invest a lot of your time, as you would if you were on a full time Uni course.
Another great way in would be to use something like NI Reaktor/MAX MSP. You can do some pretty low level stuff with that too but you're obviously tied to their way of working.
Best of luck!

 

JUCE is the only serious option at this point, WDL-OL was looking like a good alternative but the author is more interested in posting to the JUCE forum than maintaining WDL-OL and writing a decent documentation, i wouldn't invest too much in WDL-OL considering Olly himself doesn't give a shit.

VST.net has been abandoned

custom GUIs will always plague the workflow because of the damn OSX users otherwise people could just code it in Win32 or .Net
so devs stick to QT in particular, even cubase is using QT for its GUI.

other options :
Cabbage64 will cross-compile VST made with C-Sound but it's an interpreter, not a proper compiler.
the GUI is barebone, but so is the GUI of Valhalla plugins and nobody complain.

Reaper's JS is also a nice scripting but still a scripting and not a compiler as far as i know, if one day you could cross-compile and add a proper GUI it could kick ass.

SynthMaker is dead and they will never realease a 64 bit version.

SynthEdit 1.2 compiles 64bit for OSX and windows and at this point is the ONLY viable solution if you dont wanna code too much and for quick prototyping.
Problem is, full of bugs, run by a single developer in his spare time, it will take ages before it becomes a mature solid product, and the performance of SynthEdit has always been its achille's heel.

i'm not aware of compilers for Max/DSP but there's an online VST compiler for FAUST plugins, but you can't make your own GUI and probably can't do too much in general compared to JUCE.

as for JUCE, the GPL licence doesn't cover also the graphics or the documentation and much more, while anyone could steal your product's source code it doesn't mean they can do much with it, there are many ways to make it hard for leechers, or you could just sell anyway and what they can do ? i'm not aware of a single instance of ROLI sueing developers.

 

@Federico Bulangat: Fortunately i record and mix music and have a degree in applied computer science.
There comes the point for me to glue this stuff together.
After all this suggestions i think i will give Juce a try.
So again many thanks for the posts