Dev with tracktion engine or only juce framework?

hi, i am wondering about the use of tracktion engine for developping audio app.
as i am starting to be at ease with the framework JUCE, and i come with an audio project, i am asking what would be the exactly the benefit to add an other layer of external libs and modules ?

i understand that Tracktion comes with some predefined modules like sequencer and more, which is fine and can help building new music app, but is it necessary in case i want to make some other types of app, like audio mixer with effects ?

i am curious to know from you what did you get using the tracktion modules…
bye, have a nice day
uriel

I was initially excited by the Tracktion Engine open source release but I soon realized I probably won’t be using it, mainly because of 2 reasons :

  • No surround sound support. I tried adding that in myself, but there are just too many places in the code to change, that assume the signals are either mono or stereo.
  • Very little documentation. For example I probably wouldn’t have ever figured out how to show a 3rd party plugin GUI if I hadn’t gotten instructions for that from a developer of the engine. (Granted, this is a special part in the engine because it doesn’t really deal with GUI stuff anyway…It’s still a task that is essential to be able to do.)

If you specifically need to do an app that is just a mixer with effects, using only Juce is possible. But of course things often grow in scope and you might soon find yourself implementing the same things that are already in the Tracktion Engine.

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thank you so much for your answer Xenakios :slight_smile:
that is what i needed to know, especially because my app will be a surround type project :wink:
i also agree that there is very little documentation on tracktion engine :frowning:

well, i will keep going with juce, which i love a lot ! thx
uriel

Well it really depends on what you want to build. The Tracktion Engine is really geared towards building timeline based audio applications. If you’re building anything in that ballpark, you’re likely to be able to achieve a lot more in a shorter space of time than without.
Of course, as with any library, there will be a learning curve but the capability of the Engine is second to none really.


We are aware that surround support is currently lacking but we’re trying to get an idea of how much demand there is for that so we can assess the priority of adding it. So far, we’ve not got much feedback that it would be useful so it’s lower priority.
I have however been thinking about how it would be implemented and there’s a chance we would combine it with the audio graph refactor listed in our roadmap here: https://github.com/Tracktion/tracktion_engine/blob/develop/ROADMAP.md

But please, if you do have requests let us know as it’s the only way we can find out what kind of things people want to use the Engine for.


As for documentation, yes, again this is something we’ll be adding over time as we go through and work on classes. If I get time I might do a chunk here and there.

@Xenakios, can I ask if there’s a type of documentation that you’re specifically after? Is it in-code function comments (Doxygen style) or more examples and tutorials?
We’re up to seven examples now and three of those have accompanying tutorials.

The main problem we have is that almost everyone coming to Tracktion Engine has wanted to do something different so it’s impossible to add things that everyone will find useful. We can only hope that as we flesh things out over time there is something for everyone.

For example, the most feedback we’ve received is being able to use Tracktion Engine in plugins so that’s what we’ll be focusing on next.

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In-code function comments, as well as brief examples of usage within those comments will be very helpful .

Thank you.

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