README

            Super Destroy FX Plugin Sources

These are some of the plugins that are part of the Destroy FX plugin
pack. All of them use the VST plugin format, and should be (nearly)
source-portable to any platform which supports that. We also support
Audio Unit, the newer plugin format for Mac OS X. Some advanced
features may not work on all platforms or in all hosts.

Unfortunately, C++ is currently the only appropriate language for
creating audio plugins. Thus, all of these are written in C++. You'll
need a C++ compiler for your platform in order to compile them. You'll
also need an appropriate version of the VST SDK (for VST) or CoreAudio 
SDK (for Audio Unit). Right now, this means that you'll be able to 
easily compile with Visual C++ for Windows and with Xcode for Mac, and 
that it may be more difficult for any other platform. Warning: Our 
source code repository often drifts out of date so that builds do not 
work; sorry about this.

These plugins are Copyright (c) Tom Murphy 7 and Sophia Poirier. You
can use them in your music however you like, without royalties. You
can also modify them to your liking. However, if you distribute them
(or derivative/modified versions of them) then you must also
distribute the source package in order to be in compliance with the
license (see the file COPYING for full license terms).

This software comes with no warranty (see the file COPYING). In fact,
it is likely that some of these crazy effects could crash hosts (by
sending out-of-range samples or taking too much time to process), so
you should be careful to save your work when using them in important
songs. Tom uses Wavelab and Cubase on the PC, and Sophia uses Logic on
the Mac, so the plugins are likely work properly in those programs, at
least.

Pre-packaged versions of (some of) these with fancy GUIs are available
at the Super Destroy FX web page:

http://destroyfx.org/

If you are simply interested in making music, you should check there
first. If instead you want to get your feet wet making your own effect
plugins, this source code might be a good place to start. (You can
also see and play with our effects before they're finished!)

Here are descriptions of each of the plugins included. First, we have
our "finished" plugins; these have been released, have fancy GUIs, and
are pretty thoroughly tested:

transverb/

        Fun simple plugin; sort of like a tape-loop with
        independently-moving read/write heads. Lots of great effects
        in this one.

scrubby/

        A nice plugin that zips around the audio buffer like a
        DJ (or robot DJ) scratching a record. Has the ability
        to constrain the scratch speeds using a MIDI keyboard,
        among other advanced features.

bufferoverride/

        Reads data into a buffer that might be smaller or larger
        than the host buffer size, and then keeps repeating that
        buffer over and over. Gives a sort of robotic or
        stuttering effect to your sound, though many twisted
        uses are possible.

skidder/

        Turns your sound on and off at regular or random intervals.
        Practically every facet is controllable by a parameter.
        Skidder also features the possibility for extreme settings
        and MIDI control.

geometer/

        A laboratory for waveform geometry. All sorts of crazy
        effects are possible with this thing, and sports a neat
        visual display of what's happening to your sound.

rezsynth/

        Allows you to "play" resonant bandpass filters with MIDI notes.

rmsbuddy/

        RMS and peak audio monitoring utility.

monomaker/

        Monomaker is just a simple stereo utility.  It can do 
        panning and merge a stereo signal to mono.
        The panning is equal-power / -6 dB law (sort of).

midigater/

        A MIDI note controlled audio gate.

eqsync/

        Total novelty effect that retunes biquad filter coefficents 
        at regular intervals synchronized to tempo.

polarizer/

        Inverts the polarity of every Nth audio sample, resulting 
        in a crispy digital noisy effect.


These plugins are somewhat mature, but are lacking GUIs and thorough
testing:

brokenfft/

        One of Tom's favorite plugins; this converts to the frequency
        domain using the FFT, and then does a number of crazy effects.
        It has an almost limitless variety of sounds that will
        come out of it...


These plugins are experiments and may or may not work:

exemplar/

        Tries to recreate your sound from a training set using nearest-
        neighbor techniques. I thought this was going to be awesome but
        initial experiments were disappointing. Should be revisited now
        that I know more about machine learning.

vardelay/

        Allows for short delays of each sample, but the amount of
        delay is dependent on the amplitude of the sample. (Several
        bands are individually adjustable).

trans/

        Converts to and from other domains (sin, tan, derivative, e^x,
        fft); the idea is that you run this and its inverse with some
        other plugins in-between.

slowft/

        The "slow fourier transform." Not sure what this is about yet. ;)

firefly/

        The idea was to provide a general-purpose finite impluse response
        filter with a drawable model. Didn't get very far, except drawing
        a placeholder GUI.

These plugins are not in development, perhaps because their functionality
has been subsumed by another plugin:

decimate/

        Reduces bit depth and sample rate in order to produce
        artifacting. Extreme settings. Also includes a bonus "DESTROY"
        effect. Geometer is much more flexible and beautiful than
        this oldie.

intercom/

        Adds noise to your sound based on its RMS volume; can also
        swap samples around. Again, Geometer probably has more
        flexible effects that are similar in sound.



In the source package, each plugin has a corresponding directory, as
well as a win32 subdirectory containing MS VC++ project files. In 
these directories, a batch file called "make.bat" can be used from 
the command line to build the plugin, provided that the Visual Studio 
tools are in your path. Some directories have Visual Studio project 
files, but these are no longer supported.

Most of these plugins have mac subdirectories with stuff for 
building Audio Unit versions of our plugins.  The plugin.xcodeproj 
"files" (well, they are bundles, and might appear like directories, 
which is what they really are) are Xcode projects.  The plugin.exp 
files are the entry point symbol files.  The InfoPlist.strings files 
are localized values for some Info.plist values and are located in 
<language-code>.lproj subdirectories accordingly.

In order to build Audio Units, you need Mac OS X 10.2 or higher and 
you need the Apple Developer Tools installed.  The Developer Tools CD
or DVD comes with the Mac OS X install CDs/DVDs.  Xcode (if you care
to use that IDE) is included with the Developer Tools.  Note that the
Xcode projects files here assume absolute paths for the Apple-provided 
base CoreAudio SDK files; they assume that the files are located in 
the places where the Developer Tools installer puts them.  If you've 
moved those files, you'll need to change the paths in the project 
settings.

for building VST Mac CFM versions:
(note:  This section is legacy cuz we don't use CodeWarrior or build 
CFM versions anymore and therefore don't maintain those associated 
files anymore.)
Some plugins have mac subdirectories with *def-vst.h "prefix" files.  
You can use these to set various #defines in your CodeWarrior projects 
to build the plugins in different ways.  This is because CW does not 
allow you to specify preprocessor #defines in the project target 
settings (this is true as of v8.2, although Metroworks say they will 
eventually implement this long-missing feature).  In your CW project 
target settings, you go to the C/C++ Language tab specify the 
appropriate file in the "prefix file" field.  This means that CW will 
preprocess this file before everything else and use the preprocessor 
stuff globally for the whole build process.  Usually you would use 
vstplugsmac.h (for classic Mac OS builds) or vstplugscarbon.h (for 
carbon builds) as the prefix file.  Those files come with Steinberg's 
VST SDK distribution and include a few basic, necessary #defines.  
Our prefix files #include those files so that you still get those 
defines.  With our prefix files, those that end in def.h are for 
"Classic" (InterfaceLib) builds and defcarbon.h are for Carbon CFM
builds.



Here is a description of each of the remaining directories in the
source distribution:

windowingstub/

        Sources for starting a new plugin with buffering and
        windowing. This is important when discontinuities at the
        beginning and end of processing buffers translate into audible
        artifacts in the output. (For example, when doing FFT.) This
        adds certain overhead and extra complexity, and requires
        running twice as much effect processing. In addition, some
        effects do not fit the model well (a memory-driven delay
        plugin, for instance). If your plugin does not need this, use
        stub-plugin below instead.

fftw/

        "Fastest Fourier Transform in the West", which actually comes
        from the East at MIT. A very fast FFT routine (GPL).

fft-lib/

        FFT Library from Don Cross. Public Domain.

ann/

        The "Approximate Nearest Neighbors" library, which can be used
        to do pretty efficient nearest neighbor calculations as long as
        the set of points is preprocessed (GPL).

vstsdk/

        SDK from Steinberg for creating VST plugins. There is no code
        in this directory; you should get the headers and class stubs
        from Steinberg's site.

stub-plugin/

        Sources for starting a new plugin. Much nicer than the
        Steinberg examples (in my opinion).

docs/

        The documentation for users.  We include these in the 
        binary distributions of our plugins.