Overview We've been building up to this one big topic: "how to map energy to musical content." and it's finally here. We don't need to be DSP buffs to go headlong into the audio world. What we're really trying to…
Overview We've done a lot of buildup to get to this point. One thing we haven't done is talk about how this is going to be musical, though. Dumping magnitudes from FFT bins is not really going to provide us with the musical detail we'…
Overview In the last article, we built our Oscillator simulators for our Audio-to-Midi engine. We then implemented some verification algorithms for those oscillators. Now it's time to design our data structures for managing audio buffers, set up our FFT wrapper, sum some waves, and then validate the data.…
Overview In this series, I'm going to build an Audio-to-Midi plugin. There are several utilities that do this already (and very well), but I have a narrow scope in mind: create MIDI data points from audio data for forwarding to the nyx.vfx plugin. In addition to having…
Overview I've been redesigning my core library and I wanted to share the way that I manage Windows on the VST3 Controller side and some other Windows-related issues that I've come across. Roadmap We will be focusing on the Win32 Child Window process. SFML / Graphics VST3…
Overview The NebulaDrift is the new kid on the block. It's a cloud-style effect (e.g., fog, smoke, haze). It was inspired by the effects of spell casts in old-school cRPGs. The image above is from Baldur's Gate 2, which predates the implementation of programmable shaders…
Overview Scheduling midi events is not as straightforward as one might think. We have to work with samples and sample rates rather than strictly with time (e.g., in 3 seconds do this, then stop in 2 seconds). There's some confusing nomenclature and there are some midi gotchas…
This post is intentionally long because it focuses on design constraints, not just APIs. These are the kinds of constraints that routinely trip up even experienced C++ developers. VST3 development has more in common with embedded C/C++ than typical desktop software: tight timing budgets, strict threading rules, and zero…