Thursday 26 July 2012

New improved versions of Science in the Studio plugins

I've just posted new versions of FranPan and FlexDelay which fix the annoying noise that you may have heard when stopping and then going back into play in your host application. This was an oversight on my part - for a hardware delay working genuinely in real time, then the samples that are stored in memory are constantly being updated and so old audio is constantly being replaced with new, even when audio isn't playing back. But for a VST plugin delay when 'stop' is pressed in the host application, time itself stops for the plugin too. This means that when it's restarted anything that was stored in the delay now gets spat out when it starts working again because it wasn't replaced with silence when the host was stopped.

Any plug-in that has memory (i.e. stores previous sounds for future playback) must deal with this and, I must admit, I forgot. This is a poor example of software engineering, because this kind of behaviour should have been stated in the requirements specification against which the plug-in would have been tested, and found to fail, the first time around. Ah well, I guess this episode does highlight the need for good engineering in many different aspects of audio!

(For those of you who are interested in VST programming, I've fixed the problem by flushing the buffers within suspend resume methods - a pretty basic step I should have taken first time around).

The new versions can be downloaded via the old links, which are here.

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