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Post by jazznoise on May 25, 2015 21:55:34 GMT -6
So since I'm only working about 30 hours a week at the moment, I've been putting my usual show of downtime into more songwriting for personal projects but as of last Christmas I purchase Will Pirkle's Designing Audio Effect Plug-Ins In C++. He basically supplies a runtime for a GUI and the easy ability to render down to AU and VST units with the book, which is really cool. I don't want to install Visual Basic just yet!
I'm about halfway through the book new, having built a stereo delay and some basic IIR and FIR filters. A few of my own pet projects have been simple C++ objects for doing Mid/Side encoding decoding in a single instance (with adjustable stereo width!) that I can drop into FX plugins to make them switch to M/S mode and some short simple tapless, feedback delay lines for when I want a fixed audio delay for a more utilitarian practice like pre-delay. Today I'm working in an object that will be a 2 shelf Baxendall with switches for the filter at 250 or 500 for LF and 5000 and 12000 for HF.
So I'm wondering does anyone else now practice the witchcraft? Thought we could have some cool conversations - or even just tell those who are curious about it!
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Post by NoFilterChuck on May 25, 2015 22:57:55 GMT -6
get familiar with JUCE if you're gonna design plugins.
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Post by Deleted on May 26, 2015 4:44:43 GMT -6
Witchcraft, yes. started with pascal in the 80's, later cobol, c, c++(limited experience), delphi, perl, vb... also as part of my dayjob. My professional training was 60% programming.
I messed around quite a bit with synthedit since it came out, as an easy prototyping platform for ideas, i might be one of the first registered users...
But i practise very little nowadays. But well, you never forget how to program, like riding a bicycle...
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Post by jazznoise on May 26, 2015 7:36:33 GMT -6
I've looked into Juce and with my current setup I wouldn't benefit. Also I don't feel I have the chops to justify it just yet. I should be able to build a polynomial object or a biquad before I just blithely import one and dump in the numbers till I get what I want.
PASCAL - woah! My first programming was probably CSound (ugh) and some assembly/C I did for a college project where I built an analog signal path ring mod with digital oscillators and AM. Did some Python for a while. Perl, Python and Ruby seem to be the cool new languages to learn!
If you're interested in trying out some VST style DSP, Rack FX website is a great start. Really enjoying it all so far. And the plugins? They will be amazing..as soon as they compile!
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Post by NoFilterChuck on May 26, 2015 9:19:54 GMT -6
I've looked into Juce and with my current setup I wouldn't benefit. Wrong lol JUCE, even tho it's C++ = one codebase for windows, mac, and mobile app development. no need to port, cuz the code is cross-platform. once you get some C++ under your belt, you'll see how easy it is to use. I wrote my Chordie app (www.chordieapp.com) with it. |
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Post by jazznoise on May 26, 2015 17:57:25 GMT -6
I've looked into Juce and with my current setup I wouldn't benefit. Wrong lol JUCE, even tho it's C++ = one codebase for windows, mac, and mobile app development. no need to port, cuz the code is cross-platform. once you get some C++ under your belt, you'll see how easy it is to use. I wrote my Chordie app (www.chordieapp.com) with it. No I do see that. But I have a GUI library and a lot of DSP orientated objects from Rack AFX. I may get it down the road, thanks for the heads up! Cool app by the way. That's pretty neat. Have you tested how many voices it can handle at once? |
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Post by svart on May 27, 2015 7:01:07 GMT -6
I started doing C for embedded micros about 6 months ago. Not really up to doing higher level stuff just yet, but will probably move to VB for automating testing jigs for boards here at work.
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Post by jazznoise on May 27, 2015 16:42:25 GMT -6
I started doing C for embedded micros about 6 months ago. Not really up to doing higher level stuff just yet, but will probably move to VB for automating testing jigs for boards here at work. Once you do some VB or C++ you'll struggle to go back. Unless you're staying on smaller micros like 16F88's and stuff. My early experiences with C,Boost C and CSound's psuedo assembly(it does have a huge library of OpCodes, thankfully) was really interesting and informative. But I think I've typed *char about as many times as I want to, personally. Having a library of preexisting functions of objects, as well as being able to design your own ones, that just drop in is amazing. I've almost finished my BiQuad object for simple High and Low shelves. Interesting that I've seen some models where people change the value of all 4 feedback points to change the input or output gain - where as the DSP model in my book accomplishes it with a Wet/Dry mix (set your Max gain, feed the input to the output of the filter and vary its gain to vary the shift in dB). Sort of like a parallel EQ to me? Works nicely though. My brother's last job was as a test engineer for one of the Big 2 IC manufacturers and he mainly ran test cycles out of a million dollar custom machine..running VB. I was kind of shocked, since test engineering is one of those "Can you have these 3,000 tests finished 5 days ago? We promised the client we'd have it for them by 1994." jobs, he'd be running parts in the order of thousands in a day and VB isn't the most efficient. But I guess it's standard practice. The machines are still hand loaded by technicians in the emerald isle and he still tells the story of one of the more frazzled engineers running his test conditions so it ended with the heat test - brought the IC's up to about 200 degrees and running all the outputs railed into the lowest Z the thing could drive. Didn't tell the techs however! I think someone had to restrain the dude with the IC shaped mark in his finger. There was no more favours from tech for a while. |
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Post by svart on May 28, 2015 7:06:29 GMT -6
I started doing C for embedded micros about 6 months ago. Not really up to doing higher level stuff just yet, but will probably move to VB for automating testing jigs for boards here at work. Once you do some VB or C++ you'll struggle to go back. Unless you're staying on smaller micros like 16F88's and stuff. My early experiences with C,Boost C and CSound's psuedo assembly(it does have a huge library of OpCodes, thankfully) was really interesting and informative. But I think I've typed *char about as many times as I want to, personally. Having a library of preexisting functions of objects, as well as being able to design your own ones, that just drop in is amazing. I've almost finished my BiQuad object for simple High and Low shelves. Interesting that I've seen some models where people change the value of all 4 feedback points to change the input or output gain - where as the DSP model in my book accomplishes it with a Wet/Dry mix (set your Max gain, feed the input to the output of the filter and vary its gain to vary the shift in dB). Sort of like a parallel EQ to me? Works nicely though. My brother's last job was as a test engineer for one of the Big 2 IC manufacturers and he mainly ran test cycles out of a million dollar custom machine..running VB. I was kind of shocked, since test engineering is one of those "Can you have these 3,000 tests finished 5 days ago? We promised the client we'd have it for them by 1994." jobs, he'd be running parts in the order of thousands in a day and VB isn't the most efficient. But I guess it's standard practice. The machines are still hand loaded by technicians in the emerald isle and he still tells the story of one of the more frazzled engineers running his test conditions so it ended with the heat test - brought the IC's up to about 200 degrees and running all the outputs railed into the lowest Z the thing could drive. Didn't tell the techs however! I think someone had to restrain the dude with the IC shaped mark in his finger. There was no more favours from tech for a while. Yeah, right now it's 8 bit PIC/ATMEL, etc. I'm mostly working in Arduino though, and the libraries available make it super easy to get things working, and debugged. At my day job I design the hardware, but the software guys do mostly VB for test fixtures since it's a common language that most of the programmers know, and we aren't concerned too much about absolute speed, except we too are expected to have it done 2 months ago, from specs written by a salesman on a napkin last night, while it was due 6 months ago, and do it for almost zero budget. The engineering business is glorious, right? We also have a huge temperature chamber where we load in devices and test them from -10C to 85C.. Can't say anyone has burned themselves, but once we had an air conditioner go bad and we cranked up the chamber to full cold and put fans in front of it for a few days. The electric bill was outrageous and there were icicles hanging off the door, but we felt fine! |
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Post by jazznoise on May 28, 2015 9:18:15 GMT -6
Yeah, I almost went and retrained in electronics for the money. But honestly, dealing with marketing's pie-in-the-sky notions coupled with co-workers who are..Engineers..left much to be desired. That said, the money looked pretty good at the time!
Woah. I can see HR sending an email or 2 about that.
If you're getting handy with Arduino you should consider going a little further and doing some embedded stuff - not too far from going to DSP. Just gotta save your pennies for an ARM or a SHARK. That said looking at your project list, I'd say you're busy as it is!
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Post by svart on May 28, 2015 9:36:05 GMT -6
Yeah, I almost went and retrained in electronics for the money. But honestly, dealing with marketing's pie-in-the-sky notions coupled with co-workers who are..Engineers..left much to be desired. That said, the money looked pretty good at the time! Woah. I can see HR sending an email or 2 about that. If you're getting handy with Arduino you should consider going a little further and doing some embedded stuff - not too far from going to DSP. Just gotta save your pennies for an ARM or a SHARK. That said looking at your project list, I'd say you're busy as it is! it's one industry that you have to absolutely LOVE or else it will eat you alive! Pressure, pressure, pressure! The money is decent, but when you count the headaches, acid reflux, and jitters from your 8th cup of coffee it can be too much for some. I've lasted 17 years in the industry, while a lot of fellow engineers have quit and moved to completely different careers! Anyway, as for programming, I'm finding it intriguing. I'm an analog designer so I've never had much overlap in the job that either drove me to learn any programming, nor has there been any project that needed me to learn it. I've simply taken it up to work on the ADC/DAC project and because I've always wanted to learn it. I enjoy it, aside from debugging my mistakes, and look forward to moving to bigger things. We do a lot of DSP in FPGAs here, but a digital designer handles that portion for the most part. There is talk about moving some of the lesser critical DSP work into dedicated DSP ASICs and away from FPGAs. I could certainly be up for learning that. This whole process certainly helps me communicate with the programmers here a lot better, and we can talk about things in a common way rather than speaking our own languages and being frustrated with each other. |
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Post by jazznoise on May 28, 2015 18:51:06 GMT -6
Yeah, I almost went and retrained in electronics for the money. But honestly, dealing with marketing's pie-in-the-sky notions coupled with co-workers who are..Engineers..left much to be desired. That said, the money looked pretty good at the time! Woah. I can see HR sending an email or 2 about that. If you're getting handy with Arduino you should consider going a little further and doing some embedded stuff - not too far from going to DSP. Just gotta save your pennies for an ARM or a SHARK. That said looking at your project list, I'd say you're busy as it is! it's one industry that you have to absolutely LOVE or else it will eat you alive! Pressure, pressure, pressure! The money is decent, but when you count the headaches, acid reflux, and jitters from your 8th cup of coffee it can be too much for some. I've lasted 17 years in the industry, while a lot of fellow engineers have quit and moved to completely different careers! Anyway, as for programming, I'm finding it intriguing. I'm an analog designer so I've never had much overlap in the job that either drove me to learn any programming, nor has there been any project that needed me to learn it. I've simply taken it up to work on the ADC/DAC project and because I've always wanted to learn it. I enjoy it, aside from debugging my mistakes, and look forward to moving to bigger things. We do a lot of DSP in FPGAs here, but a digital designer handles that portion for the most part. There is talk about moving some of the lesser critical DSP work into dedicated DSP ASICs and away from FPGAs. I could certainly be up for learning that. This whole process certainly helps me communicate with the programmers here a lot better, and we can talk about things in a common way rather than speaking our own languages and being frustrated with each other. It definitely takes nerves of steel to show up every day, and even more to not put a hole in someone's face for the email asking can you double the running speed but knock the cost down 2 dollars. Interesting re: the language gap. There's definitely still that big gap even in huge companies in design and embedded and programming where some people are all digital, some all analog and the twain only meet in a few specialist types. Particularly modern electronics courses usually don't go beyond simulating a few versions of BJT and Op Amp based amplifiers and filters and then never look at it again - instead spending the next 2 to 3 years multiplexing on some 1980's processors to switch on and off LED's. Definitely a frustration even for me in college dealing with 4th year Elec. students who could program a temperature sensor into a DAC and then do lots of cool statistical maths with it..but couldn't hook up the balanced transformer to make the power supply go. I was a music student then, and I was trying to do balanced modulation with a handful of fets and some quad op amps (had to scrap it, went with a Digipot and ran some pwm to it. Zipper noise was crazy as I couldn't spare the cycles for interpolation - OH WELL). One day the lecturer who supervised the lab freaked out at the electronic students for making him come over to basically debug a short when there was a non-electronics student who could get more difficult stuff up and running. My brother is also an audio geek and moved to take an embedded systems job because he's always liked doing both the programming and the analogue design. The big dream is to be able to get a job with Korg, Novation or Moog. |
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Post by jazznoise on Jun 4, 2015 22:25:40 GMT -6
Just going to update with what I've built so far: - Resonant LPF and HPF with variable Q
- High and Low shelf Baxendall filter (+/-24dB)
- M/S Processor
- Stereo delay (normal and cross feedback)
Just began building my first oscillator today. Really enjoying this experience so far. I'd recommend Will Pirkle's books for those interested in VST or VSTi development! |
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