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
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
Mind the Spike - Benchmarking for Worst-Case Execution Time in Realtime Code - Christian Luther - ADC 2025
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What’s the longest your audio callback will ever take?
On modern CPUs, execution time is anything but consistent. Cache misses, pipeline stalls, thread contention, and OS jitter introduce variability—and occasionally, catastrophic outliers. These rare spikes are exactly what can break realtime audio, yet they’re nearly impossible to capture with conventional benchmarking. After all, how do you know the longest time you saw… really was the longest?
This talk introduces Extreme Value Theory (EVT) as a practical framework for analyzing the worst-case execution time of realtime-critical code. We’ll look at how to apply EVT to benchmark data, how to interpret the results, and how this method can reveal serious system-level issues that may only surface once in a million callbacks.
Attendees will leave with actionable techniques for measuring, analyzing, and reasoning about the statistical edge cases of their code’s timing behavior—gaining stronger confidence in the robustness of their audio systems.
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Christian is the founder of Playfair Audio and a seasoned audio software developer from Hannover, Germany. With a background in electrical engineering and years of experience at companies like Kemper Amps and Sennheiser, he’s spent his career building tools that make audio production more intuitive. Through Playfair Audio, he focuses on solving the technical challenges so others can focus on being creative.
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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
When Code Writes Back: Making AI Coding Agents Actually Work - Tobias Baumbach - ADC 2025
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What happens when software starts to write software? As coding agents evolve from assistants to autonomous creators, a new engineering discipline emerges. This talk explores what it means to build and steer these systems, where context shapes behaviour, guidance replaces direct control, and environment design becomes a core skill. We’ll examine the mindset shift required when code starts reasoning autonomously.
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Tobias is the CTO at Arturia, where he leads engineering across software and hardware. With nearly 20 years in music technology, he has built teams and products that bridge musical creativity and technical innovation. His focus is on developing multidisciplinary R&D environments where new technologies can inspire the next generation of musicians and creators.
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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
A Sine By Any Other Language - David Su - ADC 2025
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To paraphrase Shakespeare, ""That which we call a sine / By any other language would sound just as sweet"". As a de facto ""Hello, World!"" of audio programming, the sine wave as implemented through various programming languages can serve as a fruitful lens through which we're able to look at the tools and technologies we use.
This talk describes a journey through implementing sine wave playback using 50 different programming languages, ranging from general-purpose programming languages (such as C++, JavaScript, and Python) to audio-specific environments (such as Max/MSP, Pure Data, and SuperCollider) to, yes, even SQL. We'll use each language's built-in types and functions as well as standard libraries wherever we can, avoiding the use of external libraries as much as possible.
Along the way we'll look at some of the commonalities and differences among the languages, comparing our implementations along axes such as programming paradigms, audio abstraction, real-time vs. offline, and performance (with a grain of salt). Through this process we'll get a sense of the history, motivation, and current landscape of audio programming languages.
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David Su is an audio programmer, game developer, musician, sound designer, and researcher interested in creating new musical experiences through technology. He is currently the lead audio and systems programmer at Brass Lion Entertainment, working on Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver. He is also an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California, teaching a course on sound design for games. Previously David did audio programming on music software at Output, Sunhouse, and Amper Music. His game credits include One Hand Clapping, NFL Endzone, Trolls Music Stars, and Evergreen Blues. David has spoken at conferences such as the Game Developers Conference, GameSoundCon, and the International Computer Music Conference, and his work has been featured in outlets such as Rolling Stone, NPR, and The Guardian. He received his MS from the MIT Media Lab and his BA from Columbia University.
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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
Enumerate and Extract Audio Buffers When Debugging C++ Applications - Henning Meyer - ADC 2025
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We show a method to add introspection capabilities to any C++ application by combining DWARF debug information with simulated execution. For example, we simulate execution of the begin() and end() methods of C++ containers to enumerate all elements of a container. Applying this method recursively to all local and global variables allows us to iterate over all C++ objects in a live process or core dump. Combining this with user-provided information about which types own audio buffers and how the samples are encoded allows us extraction of audio buffers.
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Henning is a software developer with a PhD in algebraic geometry and five years of professional experience in real-time spatial analysis of radio signals on embedded platforms in C++. He is currently working on legacy enterprise applications that inspired him to write new debugging tools for 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
