JUCE for plugin development

lazzarello 2017-12-27 23:08:35 UTC #1

It has come to my attention that there is a C++ framework to build audio plugins called JUCE. It is GPL licensed (sort of) and I’m working with it for a different project.

I noticed quite a while ago, MOD’s very own @falkTX added LV2 as a plugin output destination to the JUCE framework. Unfortunately, it appears the JUCE release manager never merged the code, which is a rather depressing end to this seven year long forum thread.

Is it unreasonable to fork JUCE since the authors don’t seem to care about LV2? I’m new to the framework and I don’t completely understand all its features.

ssj71 2017-12-28 17:50:22 UTC #2

AFAIK juce plugins have been problematic to bring onto the mod. There are several synths that were attempted to be brought to MOD by falktx (notably Tal Noiz3M4k3r and Helm) and were not successful. I don’t know the details of why, probably because juce had required dependencies that don’t make sense on a headless system and therefore aren’t installed on MOD.

falkTX 2017-12-29 14:33:46 UTC #3

juce based plugins are working for MOD now, and are already on the non-stable part of the store.
My juce fork contains LV2 and non-X11 support for events.
Here https://github.com/distrho/juce

In my juce fork, if JUCE_AUDIOPROCESSOR_NO_GUI C++ macro is defined, GUI stuff (that relies on X11) does not get built.
So the result is a juce static lib that makes no calls to X11, freetype or any kind of graphics stuff.
Your own plugin code will need the same treatment. The createEditor() call needs to return null.

Almost all plugins in my distrho-ports project can build for MOD.
See https://github.com/DISTRHO/DISTRHO-Ports/
Since it was mostly a test, I skipped the plugins that would need a lot of work.

mod-plugin-builder already contains the build-stuff that makes part of the magic happen.
See https://github.com/moddevices/mod-plugin-builder/blob/master/plugins/package/distrho-ports/distrho-ports.mk

Now, if you want to do this yourself… make sure you know juce and making your own project files well (makefiles, waf, cmake or similar). Since the official juce does not support LV2 or MOD, you have to make the plugin build rules yourself - which is what I do in the distrho-ports.

EDIT: @ssj71 noisemaker already runs on the MOD, though you need 256 as buffer size to stop the huge amount of xruns.

ssj71 2017-12-29 15:59:51 UTC #4

ah I’m behind the times. Sorry!

Thanks for the clarification falktx.

lazzarello 2017-12-29 20:40:16 UTC #5

HA! You already forked it. Right on. The thread I found was quite disappointing. I gathered some traditional FLOSS flame wars between the LV2 guy and the JUCE guy. I commend your resolve not to engage and keep making great work!