A short welcome address from the ADC organisers to let you know what to expect over the next 3 days!
Year: 2025
Breakfast Snacks & coffee
Network with attendees over coffee and breakfast snacks
Online Open House
We will be opening our virtual venue hosted on Gather Town to online attendees so that they can connect ahead of time to test things out, get familiar with the online conferences systems, as well as chat, socialize and interact with other attendees through a dynamic video chat system. Explore the venue, interact and have fun!
We will also open up access to the online conference web lobby page so you can also test this out and verify you are able to access the systems ahead of the event starting on Monday morning.
Online tech support will be available for the duration of this session, so we highly recommend all attendees take this opportunity to verify they can access the systems and troubleshoot any technical issues which might otherwise prevent or slow down access to the event.
Crowded Market Launch Playbook: Refining Audio Plugin Success Through Pre‑Launch Metrics
In a saturated plugin market where technical quality is no longer a differentiator, success depends on more than just shipping a great product. It requires a system for validating demand, segmenting intent, and predicting outcomes, before launch day.
This session builds on last year’s talk, Engineering Success in a Crowded Market, by shifting focus from product positioning to execution. You'll learn how to engineer a measurable pre-launch funnel that doesn’t just build hype, but produces actionable insights and reliable conversion signals.
Using real-world examples from Relab’s own launch processes, we’ll explore:
How to structure a phased pre-launch: from teaser emails and waitlist pages to beta demos and timed releases
Which engagement metrics matter, and how to interpret them across email, paid, and organic channels
How to use scoring systems to segment hot, warm, and cold leads - and tailor offers accordingly
Practical methods for forecasting unit sales using owned, earned, and paid traffic data
Whether you’re a solo developer or leading a small team, this talk offers a repeatable framework to de-risk your launch, improve first-week sales, and avoid the most common post-launch pitfalls.
Hacking Handhelds for Creative Audio
This presentation investigates the unique challenges and opportunities inherent in developing music software on unconventional, discontinued handheld hardware. We'll begin by examining how the technical and creative constraints of mediums like the 8-bit Game Boy fostered musical creativity.
The focus then shifts to more recently discontinued hardware: the New Nintendo 3DS which significantly expands creative possibilities beyond earlier handhelds.
The session will detail the methodologies for establishing a custom development environment on the N3DS and leveraging its hardware for real-time sound synthesis, sampling, and processing in the context of a custom groovebox application. The objective is to demonstrate the untapped creative and technical potential of accessible, non-traditional platforms for audio development.
Continuous QA Testing for Plugins Using AI and Python
In the fast-paced world of plugin development, maintaining audio quality and consistency can be challenging. This talk explores the integration of Python, AI, and scriptable plugin hosts to embed rigorous quality assurance into your developement workflow. Participants will learn practical strategies for setting up continuous QA processes, automating sonic tests, and verifying deterministic behaviors such as preset recall, parameter automation, and real-time audio analysis.
Key Points:
- Why continuous QA matters in audio plugin development.
- Setting up python hosts for automated audio plugin testing.
- Deterministic vs. non-deterministic audio measurements and analysis.
- Leveraging Python and AI techniques for automated detection of audio issues.
- Building scalable test suites and managing test data efficiently.
- Examples of measurable benefits, including reduced regressions and increased developer confidence.
Music Design and Systems
This talk presents a data-driven case study of Marvel’s Spider-Man, forming part of my broader PhD investigation into the technical and musical systems that contribute to immersion in video game audio systems. Using original gameplay capture and a custom analytical framework, I evaluated how musical transitions are triggered during combat sequences. That method includes multiple variables: audio food grouped, functional aspects of audio, drivers of immersion, and emotional intensity. This an analysis provided a visual method of assessing how interactive music systems perform in real-time and how effectively they contribute to a player’s sense of immersion.
The analysis reveals a critical implementation issue: transitions and the musical cues associated with them are not designed to consider all musicality aspects on either side of the transition. This disregards the musical context and disrupts musical cohesion but also immersion as these repeated transition cues present an opportunity for obvious repetition at a minimum and clear musical incongruence. While subtle this disruption can weaken immersion and players achievement of flow state. These findings suggest a need for deeper collaboration between composer and technical audio teams, particularly when composers are subcontracted and removed to varying degrees from the implementation decisions and design overview.
By combining musicological analysis, system design critique, practice-led research (in the form of a prototype), and practical recommendations, the talk argues for more musically informed middleware strategies – such as aligning transitions with two-bar phrasing – to preserve both musicality and immersion. This session will appeal to audio programmers, technical sound designers and composers seeking to improve the cohesion between composition and implementation in game audio systems.
Engineering Practices Break Music Interaction
Have you ever encountered an interactive system of great technical prowess but with lousy interaction capabilities? And what about one with a big AI sticker up front?
This situation may be more common than we think. Can we unpack the design process of a technical artefact and understand the people and beliefs that drive it?
The engineer's toolbox is a wide array of tools and tricks to get the job done. But we may be getting more than we bargained for: It carries a way to model reality that sometimes attempts to stabilize the messy world we live in, trying to make sense of it in ways that can bizarrely fail beyond the narrow test scenarios we envision.
- What happens when you apply such a model to the task of real-time audio analysis, trying to make sense of the rich and subjective craft of playing a musical instrument?
- In what ways can you fail when your tidy model of reality crumbles, as you realize your practices and beliefs are worth very little for this task? That was me two years ago, working in instrumental interaction with artificial intelligence.
- And would you believe me if I told you that, in the end, it was through engineering that I finally brought it all together?
Join me as I share my three-year journey designing a low-latency system for musical instrument transformation. Now available, this system emerged from a challenging process of unlearning traditional engineering approaches, embracing the expressive potential of ambiguity in neural networks, and reflecting on the kind of agency we, as designers and engineers, exercise in shaping the final product.
It’s Just a Phase
Can we do time-stretching…in real-time? What if instead of just stretching time, we could freeze it, scrub through it, and morph between different moments in a sound?
We will explore this question, and more, by trying to build out some creative ideas for synthesis armed with just a few samples and the trusty FFT.
We will cover the basics of time-stretching audio using the FFT with phase-vocoding, and in doing so try to build an intuition of how phases in a Fourier Transform affect the sound with some beautiful interactive plots.
We'll then try to build out a full synth using some of these (usually offline) time-stretching techniques - a waveform player where you can scrub over the sound at any speed, use a playhead to pause, freezing the sound, then randomly move around. We will introduce some pitch shifting, and show that phase-vocoding offers a texturally rich and organic alternative to granular synthesis - no grain boundaries or windowing artifacts.
Through the whole talk I'll try to answer questions like:
- What the heck even ARE phases?
- How do we handle phase coherence differently for onsets versus harmonic sounds?
- How do we make processed noise sound natural instead of artificial?
- How can we use these algorithms in real-time synthesis?
Throughout, we'll dig into practical implementation details - you'll come away with some tools for using FFTs in ways you might not have expected, and techniques for making these algorithms work in real-time.
Target Audience: Audio developers with basic FFT knowledge interested in creative synthesis applications and practical DSP implementation.
Why You Can’t Get Hired and What You’re Going To Do About It
Breaking into game audio is difficult, though knowing why you’re not getting hired is half the battle. This talk breaks down the most common reasons audio professionals get passed over, from visibility missteps to mindset traps. More importantly, it delivers a direct, actionable roadmap to help you become the kind of collaborator studios actually want to work with.
Whether you’re starting out or ready to level up, you’ll leave with a clear, no-fluff toolkit for diagnosing your blind spots and fixing what’s holding you back.
Expect blunt honesty, no sugar-coating and advice you can actually use.