mlrVST - Project details
For the last few weeks I have been working away on a fun little project to recreate / expand on a great bit of software for the monome called mlr. The original patch was written in Max/MSP which is great for putting together these sort of sample juggling applications. However Max/MSP remains a proprietary language / coding evironment meaning it's not possible to get in and hack around with the source code without owning a full copy (which unfortunately I don't). So in response, I decided to create a VST plugin in C++ which is fully open-sourced / modifiable. While my project (unoriginally named mlrVST) borrows heavily from existing incarnations, I hope to add plenty of my own features and ideas: in particular I've looked at adding several granular synthesis capabilities.
So what stage is the project at just now? Well I have a basic VST up and running. It has a GUI, it makes sound, it responds to the monome and can play back loops at varying speeds (set internally or by the VST host). Windows builds are available but I've not had access to OSX to try building a Mac version (the project uses the cross-platform JUCE library so it should work!). There is lots still to do: presets, live audio recording, resampling etc, but there should also be enough working to have fun playing around with! For more information (downloads / screenshots / source code), the best place to go is the monome.org forums, although the github project page should be useful too.
I hope to write some more articles about the technical side of the project (using JUCE etc) in the future so feel free to check back now and then!