Tech Lounge
00:16:39 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:16:39] S1: But, yeah, this is contraption territory. All kinds of... You can see these little piston guys are LFOs driving different parameters. Like, some of those sounds are from moving the microphones around really rapidly. I think that's a... You know? And and everything in Anukari can be modulated at audio rate. Meaning, like, the low frequency oscillator is kind of a misnomer. Like, they can be 20 kilohertz. You get all kinds of weird sounds from doing that. [00:17:05] S0: And I assume most of these parameters we're looking at could also be attached to MIDI signals as well. [00:17:10] S1: Yep. Anything. [00:17:11] S0: Yeah. [00:17:12] S1: Yep. Even even the thing where I was kinda stretching around the drum head, you could do that through MIDI. Although, you know, it's... With the mouse, it's a little bit easier usually. [00:17:21] S0: Yeah. I I mean, I don't think I have it here, but I do have like a travel keyboard that has one of those kind of XY drag like trackpad things. [00:17:32] S1: Yeah. It's perfect for that kind of stuff.
00:17:32 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:17:32] S1: Yeah. It's perfect for that kind of stuff. [00:17:33] S0: I have an electric drum kit over here in the corner and in some respects, like hitting one of the cymbals, but actually the pads in those cymbals are more limited than they look. You kind of see this symbol shaped thing. But really the sensitivity is only in a couple of places rather disappointingly. A lot of it's kind of a prop to make you feel happy. But yeah, okay. Let's jump out of screen share again and talk a little bit more about how you made this. Well, actually, firstly, one question is, there's some wonderful sounds here. I think this would be very good in terms of sound design, but in terms of that crossover between sound design and music, you know, what what have people made with the plugin so far? [00:18:18] S1: Yeah. I mean, I think the the obviously sort of most famous thing that anybody's made is still this demo that Mick Gordon, who, among other things, is a composer for the last couple of Doom [00:18:29] S0: games. Okay.
00:18:29 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:18:29] S0: games. Okay. [00:18:30] S1: And, like, the second day that the beta was out, he he made some kinda, like... I would describe it as, like, dubstep totally out there thing. And it was really amazing because, like, he... You know, it's incorporating other instruments from Anukari, but he he sort of took some presets and got the weird dissonant, you know, crazy sounds out of them that you can easily get. But then he heard, oh, this fits perfectly into this, like, super screaming loud dubstep track. And that's the kind of stuff that I love is like, you know, I hear people incorporating this into their music where they take sounds that I would consider a bit too weird or dissonant to be, like, musical. Mhmm. And then they bring in another instrument with it and suddenly make it this, like, incredibly musical thing. And, you know, it's like people hear how the weird sounds can fit into a musical context. Yeah. So that's the kind of stuff that I really love. I think it's been used a little bit for sound effects on like Star Trek, stuff like that. I think definitely for, like you said, sound design, like introducing weird sounds, it's it's obviously super good for that. [00:19:36] S0: Yeah. It's I keep scrolling down your website and just finding stranger and stranger things. You've got one here of an instrument built of old circuit boards. [00:19:46] S1: Oh yeah, Those are sort of like the effect processor objects.
00:19:46 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:19:46] S1: Oh yeah, Those are sort of like the effect processor objects. [00:19:51] S0: I think you could get very lost in this. Okay. This is all right. One thing I just noticed as I was going down to the bottom of the specs on Windows anyway, I mean, it's sort of harder with Macs, of course, you actually note GPU. You need a GPU. So how intensive is the plug in? [00:20:12] S1: It's... So the GPU is really, at this point, just there for the three d graphics, and they are extremely lightweight. So I have, like, I have a stack of old awful Windows laptops I bought off eBay. Basically, people would report bugs. I'd ask them what their hardware was from ten years ago. I'd buy it for a $111 on eBay. And I've gone into where the three d graphics are like no problem at all even on this old laptops. Okay. On... For the CPU, it's very preset dependent. So like the smaller presets, any laptop can run no problem. Yeah. The huge crazy, you know, contraption type stuff, you know. I I think even an old ten year old laptop can run any of the presets. Running them comfortably, maybe not. [00:20:58] S0: Yeah. [00:20:58] S1: You know? [00:20:59] S0: I mean, it's similar with a lot of a lot of plugins. The plugins are quite heavy. Yeah. I mean, it's nice. I could see here you say one gigabyte free hard drive space. Now that is quite small for a lot of modern plugins. That's because it's synthesis not samples. [00:21:15] S1: Yes. Yeah.
00:21:15 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:21:15] S1: Yes. Yeah. [00:21:16] S0: I have an entire two terabyte drive that is almost exclusively for audio plugins because it's, yes, they take a lot of space and that's why they use a lot memory. Just in terms of plugins, we've kind of talked around this because we can assume that people interested in something like this sort of understand this world, but for people who kind of are more casual listeners to this and not really familiar with this world. So I kind of understand this, but I'm actually interested in knowing how you do this. Firstly, is it C, is it C plus plus is it something more abstract? Like how do you go about making a music plugin from the kind of core part? [00:21:58] S1: Yeah. So Anukari is all c plus plus It uses... So so plugins are... I mean, it's funny coming from... I I have a background that's pretty diverse in terms of the software I worked on. I've worked on a lot of different things. And coming into the audio plug in space, I was not prepared for how much of a pain in the butt it was gonna be. Yeah. So there's, like, the... There's the c part or the c plus plus part. And then, you know, like, parts of that are very performance sensitive, like the the code for running the physics simulation, the DSP stuff. But then there's the part where it's just like, how does it interface with every DAW, every digital audio workstation that user might want on, you know, three different operating systems, Mac and Windows and Linux is now a thing. And so for that, I ended up using this library called JUCE, which you may have heard of.
00:21:58 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:21:58] S1: Yeah. So Anukari is all c plus plus It uses... So so plugins are... I mean, it's funny coming from... I I have a background that's pretty diverse in terms of the software I worked on. I've worked on a lot of different things. And coming into the audio plug in space, I was not prepared for how much of a pain in the butt it was gonna be. Yeah. So there's, like, the... There's the c part or the c plus plus part. And then, you know, like, parts of that are very performance sensitive, like the the code for running the physics simulation, the DSP stuff. But then there's the part where it's just like, how does it interface with every DAW, every digital audio workstation that user might want on, you know, three different operating systems, Mac and Windows and Linux is now a thing. And so for that, I ended up using this library called JUCE, which you may have heard of. [00:22:49] S0: Yeah. There's like JUCE and Csound and a couple of very common ones that people use, isn't it? Yeah. [00:22:54] S1: Yeah. And and JUCE helps with the... How does it interface with every DAW part? And it also helps with the, like, how do you do user interface in a way that's cross platform? [00:23:04] S0: Yeah.