Juce for Beginners, 2020 edition

If you’re here, it means you’re an audio programmer, software engineer, and likely just figured out how they make ProTools. You’re in the right place. Let’s build some stuff.

I’m skipping the installation of Juce. Once you have installed Juce, you should have a folder that looks similar to this.

The main application is the Projucer.app. I recommend you do not remove it from this folder, as it requires the modules folder to operate, and it’s more of a pain to route them together than it’s worth. Click on the DemoRunner.app. You will see a splash screen that looks like the following:

Click on the Browse Demos tab, and you will see a menu of demos, and each menu will contain a number of header files. With a few exceptions which require the Projucer, clicking on the Demo tab will render the plugin you have selected.

For simplicity, let’s start by selecting PluckedStringsDemo.h from the Audio menu, and then click the Demo tab.

You will then see a rendering of what the author calls “A very basic generator of a simulated plucked string sound, implementing
the Karplus-Strong algorithm.”

Clicking on the Code tab will reveal the raw C++ code used to build the plugin.

There are a TON of these plugins already built for you to test out, and if you’re like me you’ll spend a lot of time nerding out on both the UI and the code. These basic models are great using as starter code and/or inspiration for building other plugins, so take advantage of that.

It’s getting late, but I’ll be back go through project setup, and then later on get into building some basic apps. My goal with all of this is to simply get more reference material out for this amazing little framework.