Hi all,
I see lots of posts by total newbies here; I’d like to share my experience as a newcomer.
1 month ago I had never programmed in C++, never used Visual studio, 0 experience with real-time audio development. I did have 20+ years of raw C experience (yes, mallocs and all) but no experience with multithreaded applications. I want to create an open source suite of modular arranger-type plugins. I have a fulltime job and a family, so I’ll have to do this after hours. After some research I figured Juce was the way to go.
I downloaded Juce and visual studio community edition on September 22, just over a month ago. And today I have a first version of a drum arranger plugin working! There are 100s of things to improve style-wise in the code, it’s certainly not 100% threadsafe, feature-wise I’m at 10%, and so on, but it works. It loads in a plugin host (Cantabile), it reads midi files the content of wchich can be manipulated in the editor and it produces correct real-time MIDI (fed into Kontakt), and it’s neglible in terms of CPU load.
I find it pretty stunning a newcomer can get to these results with Juce, working after hours, in such a short time. Juce is really an amazing product for audio development! Not just the library, but also the tutorials, the documentation and the community here (I spent hours going through helpful topics here).
So big thanks to the Juce team and to this community!
I’ll go back to cleaning up my code now - if anyone is interested in the concept of a modular arranger plugin, PM me - I’m in the process of setting up a site for this project but that’ll take me at least another month.