I’m hoping you all could help me with this. I have a fairly simple idea for a plug-in but I have absolutely no experience programming (I don’t even know if I’m using the correct word here which gives you some clue to how clueless I am about these matters). Are there companies or contractors who will develop someone’s plug-in idea? If so, do you have any experience with any of these companies? If there are not companies who do this sort of thing is it feasible for me to develop the idea myself? Thank you for any insight you can share.
It depends on what the idea is. Likely having other people developing what you conceive of and doing it right will be more on the expensive side. There are tools that will allow you to take things that are basically sound design and turn that into a VST that most reading here could do.
So it depends.
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Plug in development and getting it released is pretty tough. But if you started with learning something like RNBO using Max/MSP, you can export that to a plugin afterwards.
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Some of the Steinberg products and software would be even easier, if they fit with the design.
ADDED : Others that are relatively easy to use : Soundation, Romplur, AudioSauna, and AudioTool.
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You also could have a look at Pure Data, which requires no programming knowledge, but works as a “visual scripting language” and is aimed toward audio DSP. It is broadly transferable across a wide array of platforms, and it will for sure let you prototype and test your idea yourself. It’s very open-ended.
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Thank you for the replies. I probably shouldn’t just blab the idea here but eh. Basically, I want to automate something I discovered on the Digitakt. This will be kind of hard to describe but here goes. On the digitakt, in the LFO section using pan you can find a speed (usually in the 512 or 1k range) that kind of gets in tune with the sample. I use this trick all the time to fatten up snares or hi hats or whatever. It sort of sounds like a gritty double of the sample. What I would like to create is a plug-in that can detect what pitch something is and then automatically adjust the LFO speed to match the pitch. That way if you were singing or playing guitar with multiple notes the LFO tracks the changes in the notes and stays “in tune” with the playing in real time. Does this make sense? Maybe something like this already exists.
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Pitch detection will require something more advanced. Getting it to be reliable with complex sounds and noisy situations is challenging.
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there’re few options out there that you can choose from to develop your own plugin, all pretty much need some basic knowledge, both in terms of coding and what the plugin will interact with, which in this case sounds like it could be MIDI and audio.
that’s already three subjects you might want to get an understanding of to be able to then develop the plugin
some info in here
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I suspected that aspect would be the thing that made it more complicated.
I am teaching myself plugin development and DSP. While I don’t have enough experience to develop a complex plugin like what you are describing, I think I can say with a little bit of something resembling authority (lol), that the pitch tracking part of the plugin would require a good amount of time to understand. With my limited skills in DSP and digital audio, I would imagine that it would take me a few months to know how the hell to implement something like that. I feel that once the pitch detection part is figured out, the LFO part would be easier to implement.
Aside from the fact that you probably should learn the basics of writing code, I think that once you get to a comfortable place, a good project to tackle would be a tremolo effect. It can be a simple thing to write, and it addresses a part of the plugin you are trying to build.
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