Designing Audio Effect Plug-Ins in C++: With Digital Audio Signal Processing Theory 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

I've only had this book for about a week. First I read through the first several chapters just to get a feel for the theory, and this book is incredibly useful even if you only use it for the algorithm design and conversion to C++ understanding. I have a Mac so at first I didn't have a desire to use RackAFX (the custom software by the Author used in the book, which is Windows only). But in my struggles trying to integrate these concepts using Juce and XCode I decided to fire up Parallels and get RackAFX (I can confirm this works in Parallels Desktop 14 running Windows 10, and VSC++17).

For me personally, learning Juce, audio DSP design, while being pretty weak with my C++ was too much to learn all at once - so getting RackAFX allowed me to follow along with the books very detailed tutorials so I can focus on just the DSP side at this stage. The first couple tutorials in the book were a breeze to get running, and I anticipate the rest of them will be as well. Just like Juce, RackAFX handles a lot of the back-end coding so you can focus on the core topic of this book: Audio Plugin design in C++. Apparently RackAFX has ways to easily export the code so you can further process your plugin algorithm and GUI, which implies you can use RackAFX as a tool to quickly prototype a design and then outside of RackAFX fine tune your GUI and build it for AU, VST, and more. Perhaps experienced users of Juce (or other frameworks) could quickly rig up some tools for prototyping, but for a beginner RackAFX includes every tool you could imagine from the beginning to help you both understand the concepts, and how exactly your algorithm is working. The GUI designer seems pretty powerful, but will only take the aesthetics so far, so you probably wouldn't release any plugins developed in RackAFX as-is. Will's website seems to have examples of how you can take it further to make beautiful GUI's once you get to that level.

My opinion might change in the future when I get to more advanced topics of the book, but my impression of the book so far is that is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to understanding Audio Plugin development (even just for the DSP theory alone). The RackAFX software takes the book to another level by helping complete beginners understand the concepts much more easily, and skip a lot of the busy-work in having to write a custom GUI. The analysis tools included are very helpful so you can see your waveform, see the frequency spectrum, and design your filters in a graphical manner (when I took a control theory class in grad school, we used similar tools in Matlab and Simulink to design filters, and the tools in RackAFX are similar - incredibly helpful!).

Well written and very informative. After weeks of studying digital signal processing on-line through professional papers, etc., it seemed a considerable challenge to figure out how to convert academically oriented formulas that are a combination of statistics and calculus, into useful, practical, C++ code to modify "real" digital sound (wave) files. Will Pirkle's book; "Designing Audio Effect Plug-Ins in C++" was the first thing I read that explained how and why this is done. There were several "Aha!" moments, and an occasional; "Well, why didn't the other guys just say that to begin with?" musings. My primary interest is utilizing DSP in the realm of STT (Speech to Text). I'm more interested in clarifying speech than adding effects to these sounds, so much of Will's book is not directly applicable to my current goals. Nevertheless, after reading this book and working through all the examples, I now have that all important bridge between ivory tower academia and real world application that was fuzzy (to say the least) before reading this book. I am most grateful for the epiphanies. Besides, as a musician (just a hobby these days), I look forward to apply what I learned in this book in that department sometime soon. Thank you Will. Thank you.

This is a great follow on to the The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing, it picks up where that book ends and gives you hands on experience writing practical audio dsp's that work. This is built around there own proprietary dsp framework but that is a good thing, because you can use there code as a test tool but easily keep your dsp logic separate from the frame work and port it to your final system with little effort.

The only downside to this book is that it has more typo's in it than I would like, they really need a second edition that cleans things up. Also there is little theory here you will want to read an introductory book to dsp's before hand or you will struggle to follow along. There is a total lack of good audio dsp programming books on the market, this is one of the few gems in the void.

If you have any concerns about compatibility of RackAFX with newer versions of software (like I did), it works fine with Windows 10 and Visual Studio 17 - with appropriate setting of your project preferences in VS. As for the book itself, this marvelous book goes yet further best practical introductions to DSP programming by Lynn and Orfanidis, teaching you to write full-featured DSP applications.
As a beginner both in DSP and programming, I feel most happy with this useful book and have enjoyed every line of it so far.

I'm not new to DSP programming but I still found even the introductory chapters on simple first order filters to be enlightening. The intro to filters is simultaneously simpler AND deeper than any I've read before. In addition to explaining the theory clearly and simply, the book has professional sounding sample projects.

There are at least a dozen other websites that explain how to design reverb algorithms that sound metallic and fake. This book shows you how to design one that you can actually use.

Besides creating VSTs, this book shows how transfer functions of DSP algorithms are carried out in C++. This book, the excellent free software RackAFX, and the author's commitment responding to everyone on his forums make this the absolute best available resource. It really doesn't get any better, as far as I'm concerned.