How To Distribute Your Plugins - Using MuseHub as the Engine To Get Your Audio Tools in the Hands of Millions - Khaled Said - ADC 2025
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Creating a plugin is a momentous step, but without a distribution platform with a wide reach, it is a hard job to gain visibility. This talk will introduce you to MuseHub, the creator tools publishing platform by Muse Group. We will cover how MuseHub can help you efficiently distribute your products, expose it to the wide audience Muse Group reaches through its iconic brands such as Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Hal Leonard and Audacity and how to use the platform to manage and optimize your business.
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Khaled Said has over a decade of experience in the music tech industry working with brands such as LANDR, PremiumBeat and now Muse Group. “As a creator myself it’s been a dear mission of mine providing tools that helps inspire creators to start and finish work”.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Building an Optimized DSP Framework in Modern C++ - Scott Carver - ADC 2025
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The introduction of C++23 and upcoming C++26 features have significantly expanded the potential for building expressive, manageable embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs) that compile efficiently into optimized lower-level representations. Features like enhanced constexpr and consteval execution enable a single, descriptive and clear representation of audio DSP algorithms to generate multiple optimized versions tailored to specific execution contexts and runtime constraints.
Inspired by successful libraries such as Halide and Eigen, we will look at a prototype C++ library developed to explore clean separation between algorithm description, data structures, and execution strategies. It generalizes inner-loop optimizations vectorized across two dimensions, enabling consistent application of advanced optimization techniques across diverse DSP algorithms. The library provides us a collection of design patterns that we can use to formulate how a contemporary C++23/26 audio graph can be built.
This talk will explore practical techniques and simple examples for implementing these design patterns in modern C++, demonstrating how they collectively form a robust framework for defining and executing efficient DSP algorithms:
- Zero-cost Compile-time / Runtime Variant Values: Approaches to building scalar compile-time-constant and runtime-variant values, as well as more complex aggregate / property tree data structures, without incurring memory or performance penalties.
- Parametric Data Structures: Designing simple, readable data structures that can be optimized cache friendly access and vectorization.
- Expression Templates: Using C++'s template metaprogramming to defer computation, enabling optimized evaluation and graph transformations.
- Loop and Data Optimizations: Techniques for loop-invariant value hoisting, re-blocking, and linearization to improve memory and execution efficiency.
- Finite Difference Optimization: Automated optimizations for polynomials, trigonometric functions, and interpolation routines to minimize runtime computation.
- Unified Parallelism Models: Integrating voice-parallel and time-parallel computations within a single descriptive graph representation.
- Compile-time Graph Transformations: Leveraging constexpr to construct and optimize directed graphs representing DSP signal flows, including handling feedback loops and delays.
- Benchmarking Execution Strategies: Describing, benchmarking, and comparing graph execution strategies (time-parallel, voice-parallel, block-based), enabling parametric, empirical optimization decisions.
- Empirical Validation: Investigating whether and how these techniques improve DSP performance in realistic scenarios, with comparisons against established commercial and OS audio engines.
By applying these strategies, we demonstrate how a single algorithmic representation can flexibly handle multiple DSP use-cases—from polynomial interpolation and envelope generation to buffer read/write operations—significantly reducing redundant code and enabling focused optimization.
Furthermore, separating algorithm logic from execution strategies allows parameterizing benchmarks and optimizations based on CPU architecture and usage patterns, preserving algorithm clarity without embedding machine-specific details.
These strategies will be presented individually so they can be applied immediately in existing audio code-bases, and demonstrated within a unified framework context to highlight potential improvements in code clarity, performance, maintainability, testing, and benchmarking. Topics will be accessible for moderate-to-advanced C++ programmers, and anyone interested in exploring cutting-edge practices in modern audio DSP programming. Attendees will gain actionable insights, directly applicable techniques, and inspiration for advancing audio DSP code performance and clarity with modern C++.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Measuring and Improving UI Performance with the JUCE C++ Framework - Anthony Nicholls - ADC 2025
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This session provides a hands-on approach to optimising JUCE GUI performance through interactive demonstrations with measurable before-and-after performance comparisons.
We'll focus on three key optimisation topics:
1. Component hierarchy
In this section we'll dive into the details of how JUCE traverses components while drawing, taking a look at some of the ways you can influence this using setOpaque, setPaintingIsUnclipped, and setBufferedToImage. We'll also discuss the ""leaf node only"" drawing pattern to see how it can help avoid some surprising performance pitfalls.
2. Paint function
We'll look at Paths, Transforms, Text rendering with GlyphArrangement, and some useful caching techniques, to see how we can reduce the workload required in each of our paint calls.
3. Platform-specific
Finally we'll explore the strategic use of platform-specific optimisations such as setBackupEnabled for transient image caching in the Windows Direct2D renderer, and discussing when you should and shouldn't enable JUCE_COREGRAPHICS_RENDER_WITH_MULTIPLE_PAINT_CALLS on macOS.
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Anthony is a C++ developer with a passion for music and audio technology.From DJing, live sound, and recording studios, to plugin development, and engineering leadership, Anthony has over 20 years experience in the music industry. Over the past decade, he’s contributed to industry-leading plugins at Sonnox, helped develop the Scarlett audio interfaces at Focusrite, and led teams across the wider Focusrite Group (including Focusrite Pro, ADAM Audio, and Novation). Today, he’s part of the core JUCE team, shaping the future of the framework that powers much of the audio software world.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Commercialising Audio Plugins - Going From Development to Sales and Beyond - Tobias Lønnerød Madsen - ADC 2025
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Going from development to the first sale and beyond is a daunting journey, but we're here to share all the experience we have in the process. We'll dive into each decision you have to make along the way, in everything from distribution channels to marketing strategies, setting you up for success. The strategies we'll share are techniques we've seen work across multiple brands, some of which we can automate away entirely.
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Tobias Lønnerød Madsen
Tobias has been a freelancer supporting audio companies to grow and scale their business for many years, with a focus on smart e-commerce and marketing tools. He then took all the best strategies and techniques, and founded Moonbase.sh, an e-commerce platform honed for selling plugins direct to consumers. While he's not hacking away on new features for Moonbase, Tobias can be found on a motorcycle around in Europe, or playing some board games in Amsterdam.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Real-Time Raytraced Acoustics for Games: Dynamic Reverb with IR Synthesis & Time-Varying Convolution - Anton Lundberg - ADCx Copenhagen 2026
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Real-time acoustics in games is often a trade-off: either dynamic, geometry-driven systems with limited detail, or high-quality impulse responses (IRs) that are static and precomputed.
This session presents a hybrid GPU-CPU approach that bridges that gap by synthesizing spatial IRs at runtime from scene geometry, and using them for time-varying convolution in a real-time audio pipeline. In particular, the approach combines raytraced IR synthesis on the GPU with real-time convolution on the CPU, and continuously updates IRs using hybrid time- and frequency-domain crossfading.
Beyond physical modeling, the talk also covers GPU-accelerated post-processing techniques that shape raytraced IRs into perceptually dense and controllable reverberation, and how this enables a flexible authoring model for sound designers.
The approach enables physically grounded acoustics to be used in dynamic game worlds without sacrificing creative control. It is currently integrated into the development of an upcoming open-world title at Elemental Games, using Elias Audio middleware.
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Anton Lundberg
Anton Lundberg is a software engineer and audio programmer specializing in high-performance real-time audio systems and game engine architecture. He develops next-generation game audio middleware at elias.audio and leads development of the audio technology stack at Elemental Games, including GPU-accelerated acoustics for their unannounced open-world debut title.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
How I Learned to Love the Docs - Documentation As Design Process for Music Tech Products - Astrid Bin - ADC 2025
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Product documentation is often seen as a ""nice-to-have"" that comes at the end of the design and implementation process, and something that few small teams have time for. But for audio products - notoriously complex, serving a multitude of styles and purposes, usually with a conceptual model that isn't obvious to newcomers - communicating what a product does and how it works is crucial. So what do you do if there's no one to produce documentation?
I'm a music tech designer who has learned to love the docs. In this talk I'll share why I think documentation is so important (to you as well as your customers), how I learned to get good at writing it, and why I think it's a vital aspect of design. I'll explain how I think about docs (and some good examples), and through a case study of my first big user manual, I'll describe why I think documentation is secret the superpower design skill. In case you want to go straight home and write some documentation, I'll also prodvide suggestions of how to approach docs, when to start them, some tools I've found useful, and how to leverage the power of documentation to improve your products while they're still being developed.
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Astrid Bin is an artist and designer who specialises in making complex things useful, beautiful and understandable. Alongside her history of working as an announcer for international Lego robot competitions and explaining rocket science to children, she's also worked as a music technology researcher across academia and industry. Most recently she was the founding designer of Bela, and is currently working in e-textiles research for musical interacton and freelancing on interesting projects. She lives in Berlin.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
How to Write Scalable, Deterministic Audio Engines - Janus Lynggaard Thorborg - ADCx Copenhagen 2026
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Does it sound familiar to have the UI responsiveness drop as audio load increases, or have audio stuttering under intensive UI operations?
That an audio track sounds different every time it’s rendered?
And that you end up with a system that seems very hard to test without instabilities or generous timeouts and tolerance?
In this talk we’ll take a brief look at the technology, approaches and architecture you can employ to improve the lives of your own engineering department and build better software for your users!
We’ll identify common pitfalls like atomic variables (!), performance mitigation strategies that may end up hurting and why it could make sense to take a page from graphics architecture in terms of how you may want to structure your interprocess communication. A suggested approach will be evaluated for benefits and tradeoffs.
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Janus Lynggaard Thorborg
Janus Thorborg is a musician, sound designer and audio programmer developing open source audio plugins primarily catering to engineering analysis and experimental R&D.
As a long-tenured staff engineer at Unity, he oversees R&D and architecture of the audio engine in authoring- and realtime contexts.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Modernizing Legacy Audio Plugin Codebases - Lessons from FL Studio’s Plugin Suite - Tomas Medek - ADC 2025
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Join us for an in-depth look at transforming thirteen legacy audio plugins developed for FL Studio. This talk will take you through the journey of modernizing these plugins for cross-platform compatibility, supporting multiple formats (VST2, FL, AU).
Key topics include:
- Project Phasing: Backlog triage and consolidation, breaking down the modernization effort into manageable phases. This structured approach enabled efficient prioritization, clear milestones, and incremental delivery of improvements across the plugin suite.
- Codebase Refactoring: Adoption of C++17, strict compiler settings. Replacement of deprecated APIs with modern system calls. Source code management strategies. MSVC and Xcode project management.
- Debugging and Logging Strategies: Available Tools, Automated Validation, Logging.
- Vectorial GUI Modernization: Pitfalls of integrating a new GUI editor with legacy engine.
- CI/CD and Nightly Builds: Implementation of continuous integration and delivery pipelines, supporting nightly builds and automated testing and installer generation for all platforms.
This talk is designed for audio developers interested in best practices for transforming legacy codebases, modernizing plugins, and leveraging automation and CI/CD in audio software development. Whether you are a student, a new developer, or an industry expert, you will gain practical insights into the challenges and solutions involved in audio plugin modernization.
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Tomas Medek is an audio software developer at Image Line, where he works on plugins and maintains the build system for FL Studio. Tomas holds a master’s degree from the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of West Bohemia. His background includes roles at Audified, where he worked on a customizable, network-controlled audio engine framework and its GUI. He also contributed to life-critical medical software for Medtronic, gaining experience with rigorous safety and security development processes.
Tomas is part of the core organizing team for Composers Summit Prague. As a musician, Tomas has performed music on keyboards with orchestras across Europe. He has also composed music for independent movies and created orchestral arrangements for live performances.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
In this presentation from the Audio Developer Conference, Nis Wegmann demystifies the mathematical concepts behind PolyBLEP (polynomial band-limited step) and PolyBLAMP (polynomial band-limited ramp) techniques used to suppress aliasing in virtual analog oscillators. Geometric waveforms such as square, sawtooth, and triangle waves naturally produce harsh digital aliasing due to infinite harmonics folding back over the Nyquist frequency. Wegmann demonstrates the audible difference between naive signal generation and alias-free synthesis using these DSP correction methods.
Rather than relying on computationally heavy oversampling and filtering, the BLEP and BLAMP algorithms resolve aliasing by localizing corrections directly at the discontinuities of the waveform. Wegmann breaks down the relationship between these functions, tracing their roots back to the integration of a band-limited impulse. To transition these theoretical concepts into a highly efficient runtime implementation, the session explains how to approximate the infinite sinc function using cubic Catmull-Rom Hermite splines.
The talk concludes with a fully functional, self-contained C++ code walkthrough demonstrating a real-time anti-aliased oscillator. Wegmann outlines the step-by-step logic of tracking sub-sample discontinuities, shifting the correction polynomial, and applying it directly to a running sample buffer. This presentation provides audio developers and virtual analog designers with a clear, practical roadmap to deriving and programming efficient polynomial-based oscillators.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Workshop: Programming Music and Synthesizers on-the-fly with Pharo - Domenico Cipriani - ADC 2025
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This creative coding workshop introduces participants to live music programming with Pharo Smalltalk, using two integrated libraries:
Coypu is a domain-specific language for real-time music programming. It allows expressive live coding of rhythms, melodies, and musical structures.
Phausto provides a flexible library of synthesisers and audio effects. It embeds the Faust DSP language into Pharo, offering high-quality sound synthesis through a clean and approachable syntax.
Together, these tools leverage Pharo's unique strengths, its live development environment, immediate feedback, and system introspection, enabling participants to create and manipulate instruments in real-time. No prior experience with Pharo or Faust is required. This workshop is ideal for anyone curious about the intersection of programming, sound, and live performance. Every tool used in this workshop is free to use and fully open source.
● Prerequisites:
○ Basic understanding of synthesisers and audio effects
○ No prior experience with Pharo or Smalltalk required
Hardware & Software Requirements
● Computer running macOS or Windows recommended - Installation of Phausto on Linux machines may require advanced skills. If you are running Windows, please install [ASIO4ALL drivers to enjoy Phausto!
● Pharo 13
● Coypu and Phausto libraries (also provided on local storage media during the workshop)
● TurboPhausto samples can be downloaded separately here.
Workshop Structure
Part 1: Foundations (45 minutes)
● Introduction to live coding: history, philosophy, and the TOPLAP manifesto
● Overview of Pharo and its IDE: browsers, inspectors, live feedback
● Pharo syntax essentials for musical expression
● Installing Coypu and Phausto and testing the environment
Part 2: Rhythms and Melodies (75 minutes)
● Understanding Coypu's architecture: performers, sequencers, and patterns
● Connecting to audio backends and MIDI devices
● Creating rhythmic patterns with Hexbeat notation
● Exploring stochastic and algorithmic composition techniques
● Using Coypu's string notation for musical structures
● Hands-on exercise: building a live-coded rhythm section
Part 3: Sound Design with Phausto (75 minutes)
● Introduction to Phausto’s synthesis components: oscillators, filters, envelopes
● Understanding signal routing and chaining effects
● Building a custom synthesiser from scratch
● Creating and applying audio effects
● Connecting Phausto instruments to Coypu sequences
● Assembling a personal instrument library
Part 4: Performance Preparation (20 minutes)
● Organising instruments into performance-ready classes
● Assigning instruments to Coypu performers
● Performance workflow tips and best practices
● Real-time parameter modulation and group improvisation
Part 5: Visual Interface and Control (25 minutes)
● Introduction to Bloc for creating user interfaces in Pharo
● Building control interfaces for instruments
● Adding mixer controls and visual feedback
● Linking UI elements to musical parameters
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Domenico Cipriani (aka Lucretio) is a minimalist dance music producer and sound researcher with over 100 vinyl releases and performances at iconic clubs including Berghain, Tresor, Rex, and Fabric. He is co-founder of the influential label Restoration, a key player in the vinyl resurgence of the late 2000s.
Domenico is also the creator of Coypu and Phausto. With Coypu, he has performed at the International Live Coding Conference in Shanghai (2024) and Barcelona (2025).
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
