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!).
- Paperback: 534 pages
- Publisher: Focal Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0240825152
- ISBN-13: 978-0240825151
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
- Customer Reviews: 48 customer ratings
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,169,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #487 in C++ Programming Language
- #371 in Acoustic Engineering
- #189 in Digital Audio Production
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