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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

so this is basically a paid Web Audio API wrapper?

It does say you can make plugins, but the link doesn't work.

It would be huge if you could make cross-platform AU/VST*/AAX without the costs of JUCE, but I suspect that isn't on offer here.

Their intro docs page says Windows and macOS, but actually going to the documentation on plugins says "macOS only" https://www.elementary.audio/docs/packages/plugin-renderer

still not convinced

you can make cross-platform plugins without JUCE by using iPlug, Faust or even Rust

the selling point of this seems to allow js/web developers to build plugins

and we already know what happened when web developers were allowed to build desktop apps (Electron)

luckily given real-time and cpu constraints this might never happen to Audio Plug-ins

You can make plugins in Faust, but it's not a super smooth process. iPlug is the nicest option.

I agree about the js though. Even if it's a reinvention of web audio with a C++ backend, js and DSP just don't feel like a good fit.

And I would be surprised if the UI side wasn't limited in the way that full native isn't.

Also, DPF. And if you're willing to use D, DPlug.

I find it hard to imagine people the desktop/commercial audio world wanting to write plugins in JS. At a glance, this seems like an interesting webaudio project that is trying to be too much. Plugins are used in a very different situation where low latency and high performance trump pretty much everything. Reconciling that with web dev priorities seems optimistic.

Yeah. I got lost at JS. Buffers and buffer manipulation are everything in audio processing, I don’t see anything stealing C/C++’s thunder here except Rust.

That is indeed on offer :)

The new docs structure broke the website links, I'll get that fixed asap. See here in the mean time: https://www.elementary.audio/docs/packages/plugin-renderer

Also, as another user here has already pointed out, the "plugin development kit" is still macos only, though I anticipate releasing the windows version within hopefully a week or two.

have you looked at iplug2?

https://iplug2.github.io

since I was already making my own knobs and panels for vcvrack, it was an easy fit for building out vst3/au plugins.

Last time I checked, a perpetual JUCE license was priced similar to 3 days from a C++ freelancer. I've never heard it being called out on price before.

It's changed since I last looked. J V4 Used to be $999 for solo devs (2016), now J V6 is $800 with up to $500k annual revenue.

And there's a free tier that allows up to $50k annual revenue.

That is indeed pretty affordable.

J V3 used to be more than that. I remember looking at it and writing it off for cost reasons, but that was quite some time ago.

Slowly getting there with https://github.com/celtera/avendish :)

Support for LV2 is landing in JUCE 7 apparently.

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