Composer's Desktop Plug-in

The Composer's Desktop Plug-in is part of the cdp-wasm-suite - a collection of projects built using a new WebAssembly (WASM) port of the legendary Composer's Desktop Project - an amazing toolkit for offline audio processing and sound design that is full of esoteric algorithms not found elsewhere.

Composer's Desktop Plug-in embeds the toolkit with a retro computing-themed node graph editor/patcher, that makes it easy to wire up a network of CDP programs that generate or process audio files, and inspect the input and output waveforms. The output file is rendered into a simple polyphonic sampler for quick and fun musical re-pitching (the realtime aspect) - alternatively save or drag the output file to your DAW. You can quickly import a source sound or use a generator, patch things together, do spectral processing, create modulation using break-point-functions (BPFs).

The original CDP is a vast collection of command line tools which are rather difficult to understand and rather tedious to connect - but nevertheless incredibly powerful. Text files are used for breakpoint functions (which modulate parameters over time) and each program has many command line arguments that are quite complicated for mere mortals to work with. Over the years there have been many front ends for CDP, which typically wrap the command line tools, but somehow I was still left wanting an easier and more fun way of playing with it - so I built one. Using WASM and a virtual file system I was able to make a browser based environment for patching together the programs and rendering the intermediate files in a sandbox. Render the output quickly by pressing spacebar, double click output connectors to patch things together, easily browse the vast library of CDP programs by double clicking the canvas - all these things are designed to make the experience of sound design with CDP much more fun and immediate.

Although there are many interesting algorithms in the CDP, there are some signal processing techniques that are not well covered. For this reason, I integrated the FAUST compiler, which can be used with CDP nodes to generate and process sound using all sorts of techniques.

A collection of "recipes" are provided - prebuilt node graphs for tasks such as "Additive Re-synthesis".

I've tried to integrate documentation for all the programs, but i've also included a manual distilled from the CDP docs, which I hope to refine.

iPlug3

Incidentally Composer's Desktop Plug-in is the first project I am releasing built on iPlug3, my new audio plug-in framework. Many previous KVR DC entries have been made with it's predecessor iPlug2. iPlug3 is brand new and untested so some bugs are to be expected.

Composer's Desktop Plug-in is part of a suite of tools built on the same cdp-wasm engine. It also is available as a web app and an Ableton Live extension.