ABSTRACT
Plug-ins are now one of the fastest-moving areas of audio development, providing audio signal processing and effects that run either on a workstation’s CPU or on dedicated DSP. (The hardware aspects of this were described in Chapter 9.) Audio data can be routed from a sequencer or other audio application, via an API (application programming interface) to another software module called a ‘plug-in’ that does something to the audio and then returns it to the source application. In this sense it is rather like inserting an effect into an audio signal path, but done in software rather than using physical patch cords and rack-mounted effects units. Plugins can be written for the host processor in a language such as C+, using the software development toolkits (SDK) provided by the relevant parties. Plug-in processing introduces a delay that depends on the amount of processing and the type of plug-in architecture used. Clearly low latency architectures are highly desirable for most applications.
