from Hacker News

Juce C++ framework reaches v4 with live-coding environment

by geoffroy on 11/5/15, 8:27 AM with 21 comments

  • by tomcam on 11/6/15, 1:03 AM

    JUCE is a very, very well-designed cross platform framework that was used very successfully in the development of Tracktion, a competitor with programs like ProTools and Garageband. The API is C++ based but carefully designed to shield you from the weirdness of C++; if you needed to create a cross platform app and learn C++ at the same time this would be the gentlest possible introduction.

    Jules, the creator and prime maintainer of JUCE, is indefatigable. I think maybe he's triplets, but nice triplets. He answers questions on the forum (http://www.juce.com/forum) at all hours and with extreme patience. There seems to be absolutely no difference between the way he treats casual users vs. enterprise customers on the forum.

    JUCE can be used to develop audio plugins, synthesizer programs, etc., but is also a complete framework for GUI apps that have nothing to do with audio. It has canvas drawing, 3D support, and forms support.

    There's a ton of documentation on the site and the source code is a dream to read. If you were creating an API for something you would be well served to see how Jules did it.

    I rank JUCE with web2py as one of the two most comprehensive, ridiculously underrated open source products I've encountered.

  • by callinyouin on 11/5/15, 8:21 PM

    I'm interested in writing a fairly bare-bones, standalone application for note sequencing, patch selection, and controlling the master clock of external MIDI synths and drum machines. Is this a suitable framework, or is there something else that might be more appropriate? I feel like the current DAW offerings are A) too complex/big for my needs, and B) focus a lot on MIDI in and not very much on MIDI out. That said, I'm really new to this so I'd appreciate any suggestions on existing software I might have missed.

    Edit: As far as existing software is concerned, I'm on Linux and I'm not interested in moving to Windows or OS X. I realize software for Linux in this domain is somewhat limited.

  • by dragly on 11/5/15, 7:31 PM

    It's great to see that the OSC module is being added to JUCE! In our lab we are working on adding OSC support to OpenEphys (an electrophysiology software that uses JUCE). Currently we need to bundle or statically link oscpack on Mac and Windows, but with OSC support built into JUCE we won't have to deal with that anymore.

    By the way, does anyone know of a good comparison of OSC and ØMQ (ZMQ)? I'm curious about when to use which of the two in terms of latency and ease of use, apart from that OSC is built for audio while ØMQ appears to be more general purpose.

  • by djfm on 11/5/15, 7:47 PM

    This looks interesting but I'm having a hard time figuring out which problem it solves, specifically. It seems to do lots of things: GUI, Audio, Project Management - but I already know of tons of ways to do these things. Can somebody explain who would need this and for what? Maybe I'm just not the target audience, I don't mean to be disrespectful.

  • by CyberDildonics on 11/5/15, 8:59 PM

    I just downloaded this and tried it out. Does it not compile at all on windows?

    The interface is so clean and fast I really want to start using it. It really seems like a great way to try out ideas quickly but still end up with native executable. There isn't even an install to go through which I actually really like.