Peeking Inside Audio Units
A Practical Reverse Engineering Journey
As audio developers, we often rely on plugins and APIs that act as black boxes — until they don’t behave as expected. This talk is a practical reverse engineering journey into Apple’s AUSampler plugin, showing how reverse engineering skills can help navigate undocumented and confusing behavior in Audio Units.
We’ll begin with a real-world scenario: AUSampler silently ignoring MIDI notes under specific conditions, with no errors and no documentation to guide the investigation.
Step by step, we’ll walk through how the issue was traced and analyzed, uncovering internal behavior and ultimately revealing how the voice count metric is implemented inside the AUSampler plugin.
Along the way, the talk highlights strategies for investigating opaque systems and emphasizes how reverse engineering can be a valuable skill in the modern audio developer’s toolkit.
Josip Cavar
iOS developer
Infinum
Josip is an experienced programmer with over a decade of programming experience. He has recently developed a passion for audio and has been dedicated to this field for the past few years.
He finds joy in debugging, creating application architecture, testing, and reverse engineering.
Josip enjoys documenting his experiences on the Infinium blog, sharing insights with other programmers.