Creating from Legacy Code
A Case Study of Porting Legacy Code from Exponential Audio
Back in 2019, iZotope acquired Exponential Audio from Michael Carnes, an audio stalwart and reverb-making legend. He spent his time producing highly customisable and powerful reverb engines used across the audio industry, including post production studios.
This talk discusses the case study of Equinox, a newly launched plugin that combines two reverb engines from Exponential Audio: Stratus and Symphony. As a software engineer on the team, my job was to port legacy DSP, work on the new plugin and help enhance iZotope’s surround sound capabilities.
I will break down interesting topics we discovered during our time porting Michael’s code, as well as discuss what it means to turn DSP code from a one person company into a reusable repository that can plug into existing frameworks.
Along the way, we will discuss philosophical questions such as “What is a bug?”, “What does it mean to freeze a buffer?” as well as discuss how new value could be found by combining existing iZotope DSP (Adaptive Unmasking).
Harriet Drury
Software Engineer
Native Instruments
Harriet is a Software Engineer at Native Instruments, working on iZotope branded products. She has a keen interest in DSP and ML, having written a proof of concept inference engine in Cmajor. Most recent work in ML has been on real time applications of large libraries.
Plays guitar (occasionally), can hit drums sometimes on time. Harriet co-organises Dynamic Cast, a C++ learning group for underrepresented groups. There are chapters in Berlin and London, with the option to join online, too.