Hey all! I've just pushed an initial version of an audio unit GUI scaffold/framework I've been developing for a bit. The idea is that you write the audio unit signal processing code in C++ as normal, but then you write the UI in html/css/javascript which is then displayed in a webkit view as the plug-in's UI. In addition to a plug-in target, the project scaffold contains an iOS app and Mac standalone app target. It's all under the MIT license so you can use it for whatever you want, including commercial projects.

You can get it here: https://github.com/russellmcc/audiounitjs

I realize this is a bit of a niche item, as it requires the user to already be familiar with C++ audio unit programming, but maybe it'll be useful to somebody! I pictured two users during development - the experienced audio programmer who has no time for writing GUIs but wants his or her plug-ins to be decent looking, and the Mac programmer who is vaguely interested in writing audio programs (read: synthesizers) for iOS but has no time for the complexity and documentation diving required to do so. Another potential advantage is facilitating programmer/designer collaboration (in my experience, designers often prefer HTML to custom layout systems like JUCE or similar).

In any case, any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. In the future, I'd like to replace the audio processing C++ API with something more cross-platform and beginner friendly - perhaps I could re-implement the WebAudio API as an audio unit?

wow, this looks amazing. I didn't manage to compile with xcode3 on 10.68... do you have any prebuilt binaries I could try?

How portable do you think this would be? Would it be easy to get it to work on windows?

You could try sticking it on top of IPlug or JUCE, rather than the AU SDK. That way you'd get other plugin formats for free. I would stick with C++ for the DSP part. IPlug in particular has an extremely simple C++ API.

great work!

Very cool, even more so if it were to use something like QtWeb for cross platform compatibility with Windows and Linux, kind of like PhoneGap for plugin developers.

what error messages did you get? Probably the easiest way to resolve it is as a github issue, if you want to open one.

Here's a built standalone app of the oscilloscope example. Do let me know if it works, it hasn't been tested on 10.6 before! https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6057285/Five-Scope.zip

JUCE is not free. http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/jucelicense.php

yeah but there is other smaller "framework" to help you on plugin dev.
why don't link you with one of them ?

I know. I meant free as in time (although I'm sure there would be some time involved testing).



I filed some issues on your github page. I guess you're using coreaudio stuff that is not available pre 10.7SDK
Last edited by hibrasil on Mon Feb 25, 2013 5:57 am; edited 1 time in total

hot!

Thats almost what I was going to do a while ago Just that I hosted a webserver to serve that html. By then, the websocket response time was far to slow though...

Nice one!

Cheers,
- Clemens

WAY COOL,

So many frameworks are not free, and committing to them is a leap of faith (what if you spend 12 months writing a plugin, then the framework company goes broke?).

HTML/Javascript could work on pretty much any OS. And *everyone* knows html.

love it!