nih-plug VS faust

Super cool. Any experience doing audio/synthesis/DSP work with this in a Flutter app? It would be particularly awesome if this enabled building VST plugins with Flutter and one of the Rust crates for VSTs (like NIH-plug or similar).

Looks nice! Rust really is a perfect fit for real-time audio software. At work we also use cpal for audio output, and has found some bugs as well. In my free time I'm tinkering with CLAP plugins for Bitwig, your app looks quite similar to Bitwig Grid which I like a lot. Maybe providing it as a plugin would be a future option.

I don't think Max4Live is not a good choice for building audio plugins. It's a weird platform that was designed for 'institutionalized academic music,' as I once read someone describe it. It's difficult to program in and not efficient. None of my favorite music software is made with it. It's also quite buggy, in my experience. For doing some basic extensions to Ableton Live specifically, beyond what VST allows access to, it's OK, since it's the only official way to do so.

If you want to just dive into DSP using wires and boxes, with some additional code sprinkled in, SynthEdit or Reaktor Core are faster, more fun, and produce better results. If you don't mind C++, check out iPlug from REAPER's WDL codebase: https://www.cockos.com/wdl/ — there are some forks of it.

There's also JUCE. You'll find some people complain about it and some people regret using it, despite it being relatively popular.

There are some Rust things for doing VST (and AU) development. Here's one that I've seen a few things made with: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/tree/master I wouldn't worry too much about the differences between C++ and Rust in this world. Audio software tends to be buggy, so the bar for being considered 'good enough' is pretty low.

There’s nih-plug for VST and CLAP plugins

As it's written in Rust, perhaps it could be implemented as a CLAP plugin. This is a nice framework I've been playing with https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/

The potential is both in terms of moving away from proprietary corporate-controlled standards (but also still providing shared wrappers to support those "legacy" :) audio plugin formats) and supporting Rust as a first class development language (via e.g. https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug).

Yep, Steinberg licensing sucks. I suggest you use nih-plug, it has a much nicer Rust API and supports generating both VST3 and CLAP plugins from your code. I'm only targetting CLAP nowadays, but unfortunately not many DAW's support it.

Your best bet is probably nih-plug.

Glicol looks very cool! Also check out Faust if you haven't (https://faust.grame.fr), another FP sound programming language.

The linked (https://github.com/grame-cncm/faust) looks reasonable to me.

Chata probably needs to work out roughly what the semantics of the language should be. Its good to know what the library support is intended to be as that informs language design (assuming the library is to be implemented in chata anyway). Quite a lot of this page is about syntax.

There are some design decisions that have deep impact on programming languages. Reflection, mutation, memory management, control flow, concurrency. There are some implementation choices that end up constraining the language spec - python seems full of these.

Echoing p4bl0, implementing the language will change the spec. Writing a spec up front might be an interesting exercise anyway. I'd encourage doing both at the same time - sometimes describe what a feature should be and then implement it, sometimes implement something as best you can and then describe what you've got.

Implementation language will affect how long it takes to get something working, how good the thing will be and what you'll think about along the way. The usual guidance is to write in something familiar to you, ideally with pattern matching as compilers do a lot of DAG transforms.

- I'd say that writing a language in C took me ages and forced me to really carefully think through the data representation.

- Writing one in lua took very little time but the implementation was shaky, probably because it let me handwave a lot of the details.

- Writing a language in itself, from a baseline of not really having anything working, makes for very confusing debugging and (eventually) a totally clear understanding of the language semantics.

Good luck with the project.

Faust integration would be awesome: https://faust.grame.fr Then again we have MaxMSP, so in the end it feels kind of redundant

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

Have a look at FAUST as well: https://faust.grame.fr/

Once you have an idea of basic programming practice, you need to learn some DSP programming. One of the better tools for this is Faust https://faust.grame.fr/ , bear in mind this is a functional programming language, and has very different syntax to C++, but the same principles apply.