Augmented Audio Libraries
In this repository I'll push some experiments trying to use Rust for audio programming.
Goals
- Goal 1: Learn & have fun
- This is goal #1 and it's very important to keep it in mind if you end-up depending on one of the crates in this repository
- Goal 2: Build tools for aiding development
- Goal 3: Experiment with Audio software GUI in Rust
Binary downloads
Blog posts
- Augmented Audio Libraries
- audio-processor-traits
- plugin-host - A CLI for hosting VSTs during development
- Web GUI
- Rust libraries and tooling
- Monorepo & Submodules
audio-processor-traits
An abstraction for AudioProcessor and AudioBuffer implementations.
See audio-processor-traits and its related (work-in-progress) audio-processor-graph.
pub trait AudioProcessor {
type SampleType;
fn prepare(&mut self, _settings: AudioProcessorSettings) {}
fn process<BufferType: AudioBuffer<SampleType = Self::SampleType>>(
&mut self,
data: &mut BufferType,
);
}
audio-processor-utility
Panning, gain, mono/stereo processors.
atomic-queue
A multi-producer/multi-consumer bounded lock-free queue.
Standalone processor
Implementing the trait enables easy stand-alone hosting of an audio app: audio-processor-standalone.
Standalone MIDI handling
Implementing the trait enables easy stand-alone MIDI handling: audio-processor-standalone-midi.
dsp-filters
oscillator
Basic oscillator implementation.
audio-garbage-collector & audio-garbage-collector-v2
These are wrappers on basedrop & my own WIP implementation of smart pointers that do reference counting but are deallocated on a background thread so they're safe to use the audio-thread.
audio-parameter-store
Implementation of a "parameter store" for audio plugins. Holds audio plugin parameters in a rw locked hashmap and uses atomics on parameter values.
This needs to be reviewed as the locks could be avoided all together & it might not be real-time safe to acquire the lock.
ADSR
Basic ADSR envelope implementation.
Tremolo & Tremolo VST
Basic tremolo with web GUI
Looper & Looper VST
WIP looper implementation.
Synth
Basic synth implementation to show-case audio-processor-traits & other crates.
plugin-host - A CLI for hosting VSTs during development
plugin-host-cli is a CLI tool for testing VST plug-ins.
It's a simple VST host which can open a plug-in and play an audio file through it in a loop. Additionally, it supports watching the VST plug-in for changes & reloading it any time it changes.
It also supports offline rendering into a file and printing some basic diagnostics.
Usage
To run a plug-in looping over a file, on your computer's default audio output, run:
plugin-host run --plugin ./target/release/myplugin.dylib --input ./my-input-file.mp3
To host the plug-in's GUI, use the --editor flag:
plugin-host run --editor --plugin ./target/release/myplugin.dylib --input ./my-input-file.mp3
To watch the plug-in dylib for changes, use the --watch flag: (This currently won't work with an editor)
plugin-host run --watch --plugin ./target/release/myplugin.dylib --input ./my-input-file.mp3
To run off-line rendering to a file, use the --output flag:
plugin-host run --output ./output.wav --plugin ./target/release/myplugin.dylib --input ./my-input-file.mp3
Plugin Host GUI
Iced GUI
plugin-host-gui2 is a GUI for the testing host.
Features supported in the GUI:
- Loading the VST - Including the GUI, but with caveats
- Selecting audio IO options (input/output/driver)
- Selecting an input file
- Transport controls
- File watcher. The plugin and its editor will be reloaded on re-build.
Missing functionality:
- Volume metering/control (see #16)
Future things to improve
- Implement limiter
- Show some basic output visualizations for analysis
- Allow using the default input rather than just input files
- Implement offline rendering
UI elements
Styles on top of iced_audio & iced, see audio-processor-iced-design-system.
volume_meter
Volume control with visualisation.
pick_list
Iced pick_list / dropdown menu with a label.
menu_list
button
knobs
sliders
transport
Web GUI
See docs/WEB_GUI.md.
Rust libraries and tooling
Overall usage of external libraries
This uses rust-vst to build VSTs. For GUI, there're two strategies in place for web based GUI:
tauriis used forplugin-host-gui- Stand-alone- Raw bindings into
webkitare used for VST plug-ins - This may change as I consider pros/cons of this approach
Due to tauri bundling front-end assets into the plugin-host-gui binary, its front-end app needs to have been built prior to executing its build command in release mode.
Workspace & Building
The project is set-up with a cargo workspace. Running cargo commands at the root directory should compile all crates sharing caches.
To build the whole project run:
cargo build
To run tests:
cargo test
Build outputs should be on target/debug or target/release.
Building on linux
Since this is bringing in all the possible rust crates, you'll need to install quite a few dependencies.
See .github/workflows/default.yml for a list of what's needed on Ubuntu.
Linting
cargo clippy
Benchmarking
Benchmarks using criterion will be slowly added. In order to run benchmarks use:
cargo bench
Profiling on macOS
cd ./crates/oscillator
cargo instruments -t time --bench sine_oscillator_benchmark -- --bench
Generating flamegraphs from benchmarks
NOTE I couldn't get this to work on macOS
Flamegraphs can be generated using cargo-flamegraph:
cargo install flamegraph
The tool can then be used to run a criterion benchmark and generate a flamegraph:
cargo flamegraph --bench sine_oscillator_benchmark -- --bench
Monorepo & Submodules
This is a mono-repository and several dependencies are vendored as forked submodules. A script can sync the upstreams:
cargo run --package autosync-submodules
This will fetch all upstreams, list the new commits & try to merge them.
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