Audio Effects in Haiku

Audio Effects in Haiku

Back to good old BeOS there were some rich options in regard of working with sound. Media Kit successfully evolved in Haiku, I wish I could say that about many of the addons to it. Most of the old addons were proprietary or their source code was lost. The most interesting one was VST MediaAddOn, which was able to load VST-plugins for sound processing. You can take source code of a complete VST-plugin and just recompile it, so you get yet another instrument for audio production. Long story short, a week ago I've decided to do something about it and bring this feature back to Haiku.

First thing to do there was to gain knowledge how to actually write a MediaKit AddOn. Required information was taken from different places, some parts from BeBook, other parts from sources of Flanger, the only effect present in Haiku. Also I used some info I got from stuff disassembled by Eugeny (Zelenoviy).

That's how a first 10-band Graphic Equalizer came to be, few days later I wrote simple VST loader. Currently, loader successfully loads the plugins (compiled now by me and some BeOS ones downloaded from BeBits) and uses them for processing the sound stream. He knows how get the parameters list and allow to change them with simple interface. Later I want to try implement VST-GUI, so user interfaces of the plugins will be available.

Here some screenshots, of course:

[image1]
10-band equalizer

[image2]
VST loader (first version)

[image3]
VSTMediaAddOn and collection of VST-Plugins

If you want to participate in testing equalizer and VST-Host addon, you can download them from my site: http://haikuware.ru/apps/multimedia/media_addons