Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?

• Sonic Pi

  111 10,493 8.9 C++

  Code. Music. Live.

  

• Rack

  156 3,960 8.6 C++

  The virtual Eurorack studio (by VCVRack)

  

> juce

I would add to that VCV Rack [1] is another great starting point.

Very low barrier to entry, see developer manual [2], and there is hundreds open source modules to learn from. [3]

[1] https://vcvrack.com

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• JUCE

  105 6,073 9.5 C++

  JUCE is an open-source cross-platform C++ application framework for desktop and mobile applications, including VST, VST3, AU, AUv3, LV2 and AAX audio plug-ins.

  

• elk-pi

  7 223 0.0

  Elk Audio OS binary images for Raspberry Pi

  

• gen-rack

  1 83 0.0 C

  Create VCV Rack modules from gen~ exports

Nice, I hadn’t looked into building VCV Rack modules but it’s a super fun piece of software - there’s also an iOS port called MiRack, personally I love making music on the iPad so I use that more.

I saw this the other day that lets reuse gen~ code from Max as a VCV module: https://github.com/isabelgk/gen-rack

• ThinkDSP

  14 3,715 5.4 Jupyter Notebook

  Think DSP: Digital Signal Processing in Python, by Allen B. Downey.

• AudioKit

  9 10,381 6.1 Swift

  Audio synthesis, processing, & analysis platform for iOS, macOS and tvOS

  

If you are on macOS, AudioKit is a nice simplified layer on top of CoreAudio and CoreMidi: https://github.com/AudioKit/AudioKit

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• overtone

  27 5,799 8.6 Clojure

  Collaborative Programmable Music

  

Sounds like you might be more interested in live coding. Overtone [1] can do what I think you are describing, and more--it's a frontend to SuperCollider, which has all the audio synthesis stuff you aren't interested in, but it can trigger samples fine. Of course, if Clojure isn't your thing, there are other live coding tools out there.

[1] https://github.com/overtone/overtone

• zynaddsubfx

  4 906 6.1 C++

  ZynAddSubFX open source synthesizer

  

• helm

  64 2,311 0.0 C++

  Helm - a free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation (by mtytel)

• mb-sound

  5 17 5.6 Ruby

  A library of simple Ruby tools for processing sound.

Edit: My goal is to make a mini-synth which takes input from the computer keyboard.

If you are a Ruby programmer, you could use this rubygem I wrote: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound

A video about using that gem to make a synthesizer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aS43s6TWnIY&feature=youtu.be

Part of a long-running experiment of mine to make educational videos about sound, which I hope might help you on your audio programming journey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpRqC8LaADXnwve3e8gI2...

There have been recent posts to HN about the difficulty of reading key-up events from the terminal. I used MIDI and a separate MIDI keyboard app for my video demo.

Suggest a related project