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DAW playback advice

General JUCE discussion
#1

I’m currently in the process of building my own DAW. I’ve already built the needed UI, but now it’s time for the real deal, audio playback.
Essentially I have a project, which contains tracks, which contains clips, which contains audio samples.

Here is my UI so you could better understand:

Screenshot (2)
Screenshot (2)1920×1057 60 KB

I want the user to be able to play such projects to the output device, but I’m quite lost on how to do it.
I’ve read about the AudioProcessor, AudioProcessorGraph, and many more but I don’t really see how they will fit.
In the future, I want the users to be able to create busses and so on, but that’s a whole other question.

If anyone has any suggestions/ideas/solutions, it would be super appreciated :slight_smile:

#2

I recommend you to have a look at the “tracktion engine”. It is much more easy to build a DAW with it. There are a couple of examples you can look at.

But if you want to develop all this only by using juce, the audioprocessorgraph is the right way.

Here is a blog post that could put you in the right direction. It is much outdated but probably it helps to understand the technical aspects of this.

#3

I would also suggest going with TracktionEngine. TracktionEngine is specifically written to be the foundation for a DAW. And, importantly, literally thousands of issues have been addressed in TracktionEngine that you would otherwise have to spend a lot of time dealing with.

For example, I started writing my DAW in JUCE. In several months I had just rudimentrary record/playback functionality, and no MIDI. I switched to TracktionEngine, and in a years time I have a fully functional DAW.

The learning curve is a bit steep for TracktionEngine, but worth it in the end.

#4

Thanks for both replies!
I forgot to mention that I’m interested in building the DAW from scratch, so Tracktion is unfortunately not an option…
As for @baramgb’s blog reference, it was really helpful. I dug even deeper into the processors’ classes, and it seems like all of it’s bus-functionality is what I need. The documentation for it is a bit cryptic for me, so if anyone can explain it, it’ll be awesome!

#5

Can I ask why you’re interested in building the DAW from scratch? It is many, many years worth of work…

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#6

This project is for education, not profit. I’m taking part in a 3-year program, which during the duration of its third year you build a whole project from scratch. But thanks for the warning