The Road To Becoming An Audio Software Developer #0: The Why and The How

This blog post is part of a blog series. You can find the next post here , or all posts in this series here .

For over two decades, I’ve been active as a music producer, even professionally from 2014 onwards. Before starting a career as a software developer in 2018, I studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Technology in Eindhoven (in the Netherlands). Signal processing (both in software and in hardware) plays an important role in the EE curriculum. Despite not being targeted at audio signal processing specifically, I was intrigued by all subjects we crossed: converting analog to digital signals and back, filters, aliasing, sampling, convolution, feedback, and much more. Something about the beautiful interoperability between analog and digital signals amazed me, and it still does.

Logically, developing audio software can be considered to be my holy grail, combining my professions to have a new creative outlet. So far, I’ve unsuccessfully completed several attempts at developing audio software, mainly because of a lack of thorough understanding of the ecosystem and its quirks. Developing VST plug-ins is hard, developing a digital audio workstation (DAW) is even harder. I consider myself to be analytical and thoughtful in my actions, but when it comes to the aforementioned attempts, I’ve been quite blunt. For example, I tried to create a CLAP plug-in with Rust (and afterwards with Zig), despite only having a basic understanding of Rust, and practically no understanding of Zig or CLAP plug-ins. Also, I can’t imagine no one else tried to walk this path before, but the resources I would have wished for simply didn’t exist (or I didn’t search well enough).

So why write all this?

Conforming to the ‘build in public’ paradigm, and because I strongly believe in the value of providing others with guidance and knowledge you would’ve wanted to have but didn’t get, I decided to start this blog series. I’d also consider it a general place to practice my writing skills, and to have something publicly valuable to maintain, in the increasingly AI-polluted seas of the internet™. I see this opportunity to write as a breath of fresh air: to be able to read something clearly written by a human, in contrast to only needing to read one or two sentences to know something is probably written by AI. To strengthen the argument that a human wrote this, the footer of this site contains a link to the source code of this site which clearly shows every small step I took in creating this site.

Slightly hyjacking the topic of the blog post here, but I generally believe art, music, books and other outputs of creativity are meant to be produced and consumed by humans. The beauty of intricate sub-centimeter details painted on a 2 by 2 meter canvas isn’t the detail, but the fact that it was thought of and created by a human. I can’t think of many creative masterpieces of which the observers only care about the masterpiece and not about the creator (or whoever else is credited for it).

To conclude and to clarify, the content of this blog series is probably going to vary quite a bit from one post to another, where one might explore the VST3 ecosystem, where another takes a deep dive into the theory of infinite impulse response (IIR) filters. On top of that, this series could hibernate and wake up (or not) at any point in time — maybe I’ll write multiple parts in a week or not write anything for months — but I hope that the material that did make it will help the next ambitious audio software developer on their journey.

There's more to read! Continue to the next post .