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Kadenze

Intro to Audio Plugin Development

via Kadenze

Overview

Electronic musician and Output audio developer Jacob Penn teaches the first course of our two-part program Creating Audio Plugins with C++ and JUCE. Using the de facto language and framework of the industry, you will learn how to design, architect, and develop multi-threaded audio plugins in industry-standard formats like VST and AudioUnit. After taking this course, you will have a firm understanding of what really goes into developing software audio plugins, including how they work from a structural perspective, and the thought and design processes that go into the creation of commercial products.



What students are saying:


" Thanks so much for creating this course! It is one-of-a-kind and super helpful for those getting started with the JUCE framework and developing audio plugins. As a DSP Engineer with hopes of breaking into the plugin industry, being able to engage at this educational level with a company like Output is very valuable to me. "



Syllabus

  • Parameters, Components & Listeners
    • This session introduces plugin parameters, components, listeners, and control methods.
  • Introduction to Audio Plugins & JUCE
    • This session introduces concepts related to digital audio, JUCE, and audio plugin architecture.
  • Delays, Circular Buffers & Interpolation
    • This session introduces digital delay lines, parameter smoothing, and inter sample interpolation.
  • Chorus, Modulators & Statefulness
    • This session introduces oscillators, modulators, and application statefulness.

Taught by

Jacob Penn

Reviews

4.1 rating, based on 30 Class Central reviews

Start your review of Intro to Audio Plugin Development

  • Anonymous
    The concept behind this great. That is why I signed up. Unfortunately I find this course to be deeply flawed. The first hurdle was me being on Windows vs Mac. Getting set up took a bit of time to figure out. Once I did figure out this translation,…
  • To say, the presenter is incompetent, gives him too much credit. He may have superficial knowledge, but most of the presented material is either wrong or not thought-through enough to be useful. A self-study would be more efficient. Not recommended.
  • Anonymous
    The videos are clear and the audio is easy to understand. It's fun to learn how a delay can become a chorus/flanger and it was easy to follow the logic behind it.

    Apart from that here are the negatives:
    * Lots of mistakes in the code, comments, etc.
    * Bad coding practices (which are not at the expense of more complex code at all; this is not an intro to programming).
    * The content is more or less covered by the JUCE tutorials in a clearer way.
  • Anonymous
    This was the perfect class for me to find, after a few years of searching for good plugin tutorials. I have a degree in EE with DSP knowledge and programming experience in Matlab, Python, and some C. But I've never actually built any realtime proc…
  • Anonymous
    The content is helpful, but doesn't extend much on the tutorials available from JUCE. I was hoping it might spend a little more time on setup, best practices, and go more in depth on some of the discussed contents. I felt like most of the time was s…
  • Anonymous
    I would rate this 3.5 stars given the option. This was a good tutorial that I learned a good amount from. It's nearly impossible to find resources like this for JUCE, so really it's one of the only options if you're trying to take an online class in…
  • Anonymous
    I had some knowledge of JUCE prior, but still benefited from taking this course as I learned better ways to do some things.

    One negative I have is that a lot of things weren't taught thoroughly and were said to be expanded in the next course.

    Regardless, I would recommend this course to anyone starting to learn JUCE. It's a great way to get started and get over some of the initial obstacles of getting in grips with the architecture. Also teaching is clear and easy to follow and understand, so highly recommended for beginners.

    I also think that people with some prior knowledge might benefit as well by possibly learning a different, maybe better way of doing things.
  • Anonymous
    I have been a user of Output plugins for the last several years, so when I saw the opportunity to take a course in plugin development from two of the people responsible for some of my favorite plugins, I didn't hesitate. Jumping in, it became clear this was a great choice. Jacob is an excellent instructor, and explains complex and deep technical subjects in an accessible and thoughtful way. I learned tons about not only DSP and plugin development, but C++ and software development more broadly. This course was an excellent way to jump into the plugin development space, and I plan to build on what I learned in this class. Couldn't recommend this course enough.
  • Anonymous
    Taking the “Intro to Audio Plugin Development” course on Kadenze has been a great experience. The topics are well distributed, starting from the basic foundations and moving progressively toward more complex subjects.

    The introduction helps to learn or refresh digital audio fundamentals. The diagrams and animations support the concepts discussed in the lectures. Using JUICE to create Audio Plugins is a great way to start making your effects, rather than code everything from the bottom.

    I very much appreciate the cadence of the instructor: clear and well-explained sessions.

    Thank you for a great course!
  • Anonymous
    Wow one hundred characters, guys, most of the stuff which I had to submit to get the certificate (which I did not get btw) was completely unrelated to audio programming, recording a video and commenting and participating in the forums. This is not o…
  • James G
    Found this course to be a great overview of the process of making plugins. I'm personally not a very skilled coder but was interested to find out exactly how plugins are made... the course does a great job of explaining the process. I could just about follow along with the coding examples though personally I wouldn't be able to repeat it to this level (unless copying exactly step by step)... for that I would need to practice C++ a lot first I think. You'd definitely need intermediate C++ knowledge to follow this through in a way you could repeat with your own plugin designs.
  • Profile image for Costas Economou
    Costas Economou
    This course is a good introduction to audio programming using C++ for the absolute beginner. While it does not cover all the necessary topics to develop a full plugin, the choice of a simple delay plugin is a good one - it doesn't require advanced techniques to implement yet it can still challenge the beginner conceptually.

    The instructor does a great job introducing new concepts and the pacing is just right.
  • Anonymous
    It's good but not that great. Nothing more to expect from seemingly young teachers. If you want more clarity and dig deep into audio signal processing, I'd suggest you take a look at Will Prickle's book on C++ Audio Plugin Development. He has experience of over 25 years. But if you wanna learn on the surface level (where JUCE covers all the stuff for you) you can stick with this course just to get used with the JUCE interface and classes it provides.
  • Sam Prouse
    This is an excellent course for anyone interested in developing audio plugins with JUCE. The course is well presented with great explanations. Great for beginners or developers interested in JUCE. As a music technology student I found this course super useful. I would highly recommend it to anyone.
  • Anonymous
    I quite enjoyed this course, however the JUCE framework keeps throwing out errors for what seems like no reason, I have even typed out all of the lines code for code. Another issue is that Jacob keeps typing out code without explaining the thought process behind it. It is probably because I am a beginner when it comes to DSP but not c++. Thanks for the course boys, is quite nice.
  • Anonymous
    This course was excellent. I had just finished all of the computer programming classes in my local community college and was searching for a way to continue to purse my ambition of developing plug-ins when I heard about this from one of the teachers on a podcast. I decided to check it out and was not disappointed. It gives a good introduction to working with JUCE and the basics of simple plug-in programming.
  • Anonymous
    The instruction was clear and the walk through examples were relevant and helpful to understand how to use this environment to program plugins and standalone audio apps.
  • Anonymous
    Have not finished, but found the course material to be relevant and useful in my learning pursuits. Thank you for sharing this course.
  • Anonymous
    This course is really explaining everything you need to know and speed up your learning curve breaking the initial part.
  • Anonymous
    This course gave a good introduction to how to create a basic audio plugin program in C++. It focuses more on the overall structure of the software, instead of aspects like DSP and UI, which I think is good as it is hard to find many resources on this aspect of audio programming. There were some technical issues I encountered following the sessions due to the course getting old now but they weren't too hard to resolve with a bit of searching in the forums and internet.

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