Oh my goodness, hello! Pamplejuce has been a life-saver-- having github actions with pluginval proved to be an absolute necessity when building and linking the hacked encoder libraries. I love reading your juce blogposts as well. Thank you for all that you do!
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 are a lot of opportunities for creativity with delay, once you have the basic code down.
The plugin project structure can be a bit confusing at first, especially in the interaction between the GUI code and the audio processing code. The tutorials are helpful for that: once you've copied a tutorial, you can try expanding it, adding more knobs etc.
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 something that I call a scaler¹, I learned so much about music theory while doing this.
1- 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.
edit: I forgot to add that your plug-in is awesome
>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.
Yes, absolutely! Lossy was one of my main inspirations in coding MAIM, and I would recommend their plugin highly: it sounds beautiful, although it is perhaps a bit less "accurate," since it does not use real MP3 encoders.
very cool to hear lossy was an inspiration, and to know there's a more accurate version of the same idea out there in the world. and yes that's a totally accurate characterization re: accuracy when it comes to lossy. the loosely-based-on-mp3-ness also lets us be creative with certain engineering constraints, like getting it onto a guitar pedal: https://www.chasebliss.com/lossy
Thanks for the comment! I really love the quality and attention to detail you folks put into your plugins, and I had no idea you made Lossy into a pedal. So cool!
