Creating Audio Plugins

WARNING: This page is currently being written, please check in later!

What is a plugin?

A plugin is an addition to an existing piece of software, to provide it with new features. For the MOD, each plugin is one effect: so each effect installed on your MOD is a "plugin". The MOD is aware of the plugins currently installed, and is able to use them to process your guitar's audio.

A plugin has "ports", which allows audio or control values to be used in a plugin. Audio ports provide the audio to be processed to a plugin. Control ports allow a value set by the UI or the MOD hardware to be used in the plugin itself. Simple plugins expose a small number of control ports (often less than 3), but it is allow to have a large number of control ports. These controls are the dials that you see in the MOD interface, and the controls that you can assign the MOD hardware dials and footswitches to!

Presets can be saved of the control ports. These presets can be loaded by the MOD, and are a good way to get good settings from which to start playing. Basic plugins use only control and audio ports, but more powerful plugins can also use Atom ports for MIDI messages. This allows building synthesizers and advanced plugins that interact directly with MIDI controllers.

LV2 standard

TODO: explain ports, extensions, host-side presets, static ttl

Basic skeleton

TODO: lv2.h plugin struct, lv2_instantiate call and export symbol

Alternative Frameworks

TODO: Juce and DPF. (Juce WIP)

Alternative Methods

TODO: Faust, Max/MSP, Puredata. Also csound, lua, contact if interested.

Setting up the turtle data

TODO: how hosts know what plugin has, meta-data TODO: Caution, human-error, typos.

LV2 book

link