Sidechain AUs

Well, it seems that the state of affairs is still rather sad on this one… plus friscokids code (which did great for a while) doesn’t really work anymore with the current version of JUCE. Jules, do you think this can be resolved? Would be a shame if sidechaining continued to be unsupported…

Sorry I’ve not been entirely on top of this one, it’s not an area where I’ve had enough time to really understand the problem myself. Might have to give Andy a nudge though, he promised me some mods for this a long time ago…

mya be we can get some amount of money to bring some motivation?
for example, I forced to use juce 1.50 because I have heavy modifications in the plugin wrapper area, and it is a real pain to port these changes from version to version.
Taking in account that I already payed for a commercial juce license, I’ll gladly pay for these features one more time. And for vst3 and aax support too.

Jules, could you please tell us how can we motivate you. No irony here. I really think that it is better to pay than wait two years more =)

It’s not really about money - it’s just that my brain is too full! I’m in the middle of all the introjucer/openGL/mobile stuff right now, but as soon as I’ve got a bit more time, I know I need to give the plugin stuff a bit of attention again.

A side note:
At the moment no sidechain is supported in any plugin format (all except VST2 provide some sort of sidechain handling) and thus the plugin wrappers only provide the ‘main’ channels.
Before someone jumps at some implementation for sidechain handling, I think the AudioSampleBuffer class (or maybe AudioProcessor::processBlock() , though the first is probably better suited to not break any existing code) should be extended to give some support for the extra sidechain channels.

As far as I understand VST3 and AU support multiple input/output busses, which can be marked as sidechain in case of VST3. Therefore I’d suggest to also add some kind of additional busses to the AudioSampleBuffer, maybe with a flag for sidechain.

Another obstacle is to find a common denominator for the various formats, e.g what will VST2 do, if the plugin has several additional busses. Also, RTAS (afaik) only supports a mono sidechain, while VST3 sidechains can have almost any number of channels.

Chris

What bunker said.

  • 1 on aax support and side chain.

Salvator

[quote=“jules”]
It’s not really about money - it’s just that my brain is too full! I’m in the middle of all the introjucer/openGL/mobile stuff right now, but as soon as I’ve got a bit more time, I know I need to give the plugin stuff a bit of attention again.[/quote]
Just suggesting, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to apply for something like Google Summer of Code or alike and get interns to work on these issues? Or we could get our companies or ourselves to raise money to pay for the young and innocent blood of CS Graduates :wink:

I’m pretty sure many members here, including me, would be glad to accompany interns in their research. This way you still have control over what’s in the code but you gain some time and help students enrich their resumes.

In any case, I can always try to free some time (or sleep less :slight_smile: ) to help on some issues.

Of course - I’m always happy when people want to contribute code! Just don’t have enough time to organise it myself!

Maybe it’s a good idea to start from what Friscokid had… as I mentioned, it worked really well until (I guess) 1.53. I’ve made a first attempt at rectifying things but it doesn’t really sidechain at the moment, unfortunately (although Logic recognizes the extra channels). Friscokid, have you ever updated your stuff?

Hi Jules,

We know you’re working on AAX as well as other projects, so just curios to know if Sidechain would be one of em’? Sorry to keep bringing it up again, but it seems many ppl would like to have this functionality implemented in JUCE… :?

[quote=“adel”]Hi Jules,

We know you’re working on AAX as well as other projects, so just curios to know if Sidechain would be one of em’? Sorry to keep bringing it up again, but it seems many ppl would like to have this functionality implemented in JUCE… :?[/quote]

Sorry, my brain’s capacity gauge is showing “dangerously full”.

But I know people have looked into this and come up with their own solutions for this - if you all wanted to club together and give me some code that more-or-less works and just requires a bit of tidying-up and juceifying, then I could handle that!

Is there any chance of this happening soon, especially with all of the VST3 improvements?

Work on our VST is pretty much complete. At this point, we've simply given the option for our plug-in to have 4 inputs, and most modern hosts are completely cool with that (Ones that aren't will default down to two, but this hasn't happened on any host we've tested).

However, I'm starting to wonder if we should hold off on releasing an AU, since it'd be tough to tell customers "Sorry, these are VST only features".

I've had some side-chain code sitting in my in-box for a long time waiting for my attention.. It'll be a bit disruptive to integrate, which is why I've not done it yet, but I will!

Is there anything we can do to help progress in this issue?

Maybe you can share that patch and give some instructions on what's missing in it or requires modifications and we could attempt to do this integration for JUCE?

The main problem is just me finding enough uninterrupted time to properly investigate the problem and figure out a good solution.. The offer of help is much appreciated though, and don't worry, I'll certainly won't hesitate to appeal for help as soon as there's something to ask for!

Jules - did you get to this? cheers man!

The work on new property classes was a higher priority, so I haven't got around to this yet, but it's not forgotten!

Just a friendly bump for the ROLI overlords. I'm still getting a few e-mails from our users every week asking about our AU sidechain support.

Understood, it's on our big to-do-list..