What is this?

Brinicle is a proof-of-concept, polyglot framework for creating audio effect plug-ins. Audio processing is written in rust, and the user interface is written in javascript using react-native. Currently the only supported format is audio units v2, but many of the concepts could be generalized to other formats.

Is this ready for production use?

Probably not without serious investment - this is just a proof of concept framework to explore what’s possible.

Why do something like this?

This was done for a few reasons - first, so that I could personally learn more about the technologies involved, and also to dream about a more modern way to write audio software. Currently the vast majority of audio plug-ins are written in C++, using user-interface libraries that are quite a bit older than react-native. Is the reactive approach a better one for writing audio software? Is rust a better language for signal processing than C++? The idea of creating this proof-of-concept was to begin to answer these questions.

How do I create a brinicle project?

Prerequisites

• [ ] node.js
• [ ] rust
• [ ] rust aarch64-apple-ios toolchain (rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios)
• [ ] rust x86_64-apple-ios toolchain (rustup target add x86_64-apple-ios)
• [ ] xcode 10

Starting a project

Brinicle comes with scaffolding script called create-brinicle>. You can create your brinicle project by calling npx create-brinicle <folder>. You will be prompted for some relevant information.

Then, to build your project, open the xcode project in the mac folder. To get started, build the target called <project name>TestApp. This will build a stand-alone application where you can test your effect before running a plug-in build. It is critical that you disable parallelize builds from the scheme options in xcode - this is required to build any react-native project due to some configuration choices made upstream. Sometimes the first build will fail building underlying react libraries; if this happens please try again and it may succeed next time.

If you did everything right, it should look something like this:

To build a plug-in, build the target named <project name>AU. In most hosts, due to sandboxing, you’ll only be able to run the release build inside the host.

How do I edit the UI code?

The user interface code is written in javascript, and the entry point is in mac/index.mac.js.

How do I edit the signal processing code?

The signal processing code is written in rust, and the entry point is rust/kernel/src/lib.js