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Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

wildergardenaudio.com

61–68 of 68 posts

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. Unfortunately Linux support is relatively rare in VST land. Also I wish CLAP would get more traction as a plugin format.

As someone producing in linux land I wish CLAP was more widespread as well

Meanwhile, we have JUCE and it produces perfectly cromulant Linux VST3's ..

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#62
post #14

Hey, I'm a long-time music producer and I'm dying to get into this exact kind of work - writing plugins and eventually synthesizers from scratch. I'm curious what your path was to get to the point where you can write an audio plug-in from scratch - I noticed you're using the JUCE framework, and that's about as far as I got and I never really escaped tutorial hell.

If you want to learn JUCE, one of the best things you can do is clone every single repo in Sudara's wonderful juce-awesome list, and every week do a mass update of the repositories - you will learn a lot as there are some projects which really push new updates hard each week, and just learning what was committed will give you a great path to learn things ..

https://github.com/sudara/awesome-juce

(Direct link to the raw data here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sudara/awesome-juce/main/s...)

Some truly wonderful things in there to learn from - starting with basic plugins, all the way up to synthesizers and a full DAW. Be sure you mine that resource!

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#63
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would absolutely recommend using JUCE-- it is very well documented, with an active forum full of helpful people. When starting out, the first plugin I made was a gain/panning plugin, then a simple saturation plugin. These are good ones to start out with, since the output for a sample only depends on the input of that sample, and not the samples before it. After that, I would recommend making a delay plugin: there a…

I completely agree with your comment and would like to emphasize the part of about the delay. I wrote a toy synthesizer for the ESP32 where I used STK for the bulk of the synthesis. That was pleasant endeavor but the real pleasure started when I wrote my delay effect. I had so much fun adding features like multiple playback heads with separate feedback and volume. Another fun thing to implement was the apregiator and…

>There is probably a name for that effect where you choose a scale and if the effect receives a note outside, it outputs the closest note in the selected scale.

Pitch quantization.

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#64

Very cool. Some of the more extreme examples start to remind me of one of the B-sides of Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker.

not just the WL B-sides, but there are also a few snatches of audio glitching in WL itself[0] and most of his work from '99 or so leans heavily on these exact distortions.

There was even one album that the name escapes me right now (all the track names were named like, if not directly after, exploits) where every other track was more or less just a string of encoder glitches.

I suspect a lot of his sound from that period came from griefing MP3 encoder settings (I mean pretty much all his music features some form of audio sample/synth griefing.)

As soon as I heard those examples the first thing I thought of was Aphex twin (and actually also specifically windowlicker)

[0] https://youtu.be/FATTzbm78cc?t=152 - the "underwater" effect can be heard in this timestamp but there are definitely others layered in the background throughout the track

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#65

I love the fact that you're shipping a linux version of this. Thank you, really! I do not understand why developers who make VST3 plugins explicitly choose not to ship linux builds by choice.

Windows VSTs typically run fine under Wine if your DAW supports it

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#67
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought an interesting format would have been the plastic disc with a physical track similar to vinyl, but read optically so that it could be a disc that was compact like that other digital format. The loss in fidelity would naturally cause the format to have a charm of its own. Sort of like those old films with an optical audio track that have a distinctive sound.

Laserdisc is analog optical, but not so compact.

Analog audio was first, and video was always analog, but most of the time laserdisc audio playback is literally CD Audio (not merely 16bit/44.1khz but the same intermediate data/error correction/scrambling... even CD-G was recycled into LD-G)

That said, assuming a pilot signal was added one could probably put two to three hours of PAL-frequency analog audio (which completely went away with digital sound) onto a CD.

Re: Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

#68
post #59
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember first seeing that quote on a Kotaku article, where they had unfortunately misinterpreted "the crap sound of 8-bit" as referring to retro videogame music made on 8-bit CPUs, rather than (what he was actually referring to) 8-bit audio[0]. [0] i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth

Funnily enough, to get the "crap sound of 8-bit" you usually needed a 16-bit computer (the Amiga). But that's nothing compared to the "crap sound of 1-bit", i.e. playing sampled sound using the PC speaker. I still remember thinking "how is this even possible?!" when I first heard it...

Yeah, it's amazing what you can do with just a 1-bit pulse. You can even do multiple instruments[0] or win the loudness war[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9PfEFw78I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ANEQu5Lto

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