https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon
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A Critique of Audio Plug-In Formats - VST, AU, AAX, JUCE and Beyond - Fabian Renn-Giles - ADC 2024
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Audio plug-in formats such as VST, AU, and AAX have revolutionized the audio workflow, empowering a whole industry of creative coders. However, as programming paradigms and user expectations evolve, the design decisions of these established formats must be re-evaluated. This talk critically examines these design choices, exploring how they can be improved, and there is a new contender: CLAP.
The presentation is divided into two sections: a developer-focused critique and a customer-centric analysis. The developer-focused section delves into fundamental design flaws in plug-in APIs, such as stateful lifecycle management, poor single-use interface design, and why the overarching synchronous “process block” design may become quickly outdated with ever-increasing specialized hardware. The talk also discusses more audio plug-in specific issues like ambiguous parameter/state ownership, the limited utility of the “maxSamplesPerBlock” parameter, and what we can learn from Linux about negotiating bus formats.
The second section critiques audio plug-ins from the user’s standpoint. The talk explores major pain points such as lack of portability, cumbersome copy-protection mechanisms, and the archaic practice of plug-in scanning. The section concludes with a call-to-action for the industry to adopt unified standards as the only real solution to these problems.
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Slides: https://data.audio.dev/talks/2024/critique-of-audio-plugin-formats/slides.pdf
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Fabian Renn-Giles
Fabian is a freelance C++ programmer, entrepreneur and consultant in the audio software industry. Before this, he was staff engineer at ROLI Ltd. and the lead maintainer/developer of the JUCE C++ framework (www.juce.com) - an audio framework used by thousands of commercial audio software companies. Before joining ROLI, he completed his PhD at Imperial College London, developing a numerical quantum optics solver with modern digital signal processing techniques and C++/MPI/OpenCL. Fabian is now a regular consultant specializing on low-level real-time C++, embedded audio, time sensitive networks, audio over WiFi and audio plug-in formats. His clients range from early startups to FAANG companies. Additionally, he is a regular speaker at the audio developer conference ADC and other C++ conferences.
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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.
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC24 Team:
Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra
#vst #juce #adc #audiodev #dsp #audio #conferenceaudio #audioprocessing #audioproduction #audioprogramming #musictech #soundtech #audiotech #audiotechnology
