Tech Lounge
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.
00:23:04 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:23:04] S0: Yeah. [00:23:05] S1: I think these days, a lot of people are trending more towards, like, web view type stuff to the interface, which is very cool. But, like, you know, the three d graphics part of this, you know, to make it... I wanted it to be super super super performant, and so it's just all c plus plus. And, you know, I have my gripes about juice, but it does make a lot of things a lot easier. Yeah. [00:23:28] S0: Yeah. And I guess this is how you handle... Because I now pretty much see every time I ever acquire a plugin, it has Mac standalone, Windows standalone, VST, AU, AAX, which are plugin formats and pretty much every time everything is included, including sometimes some other ones as well. But... So is that something that JUCE also handles? [00:23:52] S1: Yep. Yep. JUCE is... It makes all that stuff pretty easy. And like a like a lot simpler than if you were to do it yourself, which is possible, but but you'd be writing code individually for each of those types of plug Yeah. Yeah. I think the one that's missing these days that people are excited about is Clap as a new plugin format. Think But I think that's coming. [00:24:13] S0: Yeah. I think I've heard of it. I don't know. I totally... I... I've kind of tried to keep things as AU as possible. So, this is Apple's audio units and then VST3 if it's not offered. It [00:24:29] S1: is a complicated world.
00:24:29 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:24:29] S1: is a complicated world. [00:24:31] S0: It is. And it's kind of strange because you sort of realize that obviously it's relatively easy now for people to make the different formats. My layman's thought is they can't be that different from each other in that all the doors usually support them anyway. So surely we could just decide and standardize. [00:24:53] S1: Yeah, there's an old xkcd comic about, you know, 15 formats, it's out of sixteenth. [00:24:59] S0: And let me guess, Clap is is the one that aims to do that now. [00:25:04] S1: That I I... Every time I think of Clap, I think of that that same comic. But... No. It's... I mean, it's a it's a hilarious question. And if you go into the Linux space, there's also even more [00:25:14] S0: Really? [00:25:14] S1: Plug in formats. Yeah. For some reason. [00:25:16] S0: Yeah. I guess because the software is less of... I think Bitwig is the only one of the commercials that's available on Linux now, think. [00:25:26] S1: There's... Yeah. There's a few. The support is quite varied. Yeah. It's very mixed. [00:25:32] S0: Of the commercial ones, I mean, more than... There obviously are other open source ones and things. I think from memory, see [00:25:38] S1: Bitwig and Reaper [00:25:40] S0: Oh, Reaper. [00:25:40] S1: And VCV Rack. Yeah. There... There's there's a few. Yeah. But... Yeah. I mean, I'd say Bitwig and Reaper and VCV Rack are the ones that I trust. A lot of Linux is sorta like, yeah, it runs on Linux, but do we really support it?
00:25:40 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:25:40] S1: And VCV Rack. Yeah. There... There's there's a few. Yeah. But... Yeah. I mean, I'd say Bitwig and Reaper and VCV Rack are the ones that I trust. A lot of Linux is sorta like, yeah, it runs on Linux, but do we really support it? [00:25:54] S0: Yeah. It's kinda like Android audio, unfortunately. There's so many options. It's not that the hardware is good or bad. It's just you can't rely on what you're gonna get. So... Yeah. [00:26:06] S1: For for what it's worth, I think the the whole standardization thing, I tend to blame Steinberg, the company that made the VST format because they... That was, you know, I think one of the early ones that became very popular. [00:26:18] S0: Yep. [00:26:18] S1: Yeah. And they they forced developers to sign an agreement with them and they had to like approve you. Okay. And if it had just been open source and simple from the beginning, maybe we just have one. [00:26:28] S0: No comment. Good old German company. Not not in Berlin, but yes. So another thing that the audio plugins often do, which is really annoying, and I... I'd like to get your perspective on this, I don't think you're doing this, is the number of plugins I have that require some other application to authenticate and run. And oh my God, it's so annoying. It is iLok or there's something then plus iLok and I just have dozens of these applications just to install one plugin. And I'm assuming from what I see from your site, you're not doing this.