How I built my own set of audio plugins with JUCE

A build log on ESP, six VST3 plugins written in C++ with JUCE 8 and shipped through a store I built myself. What the framework does for you, where it stops, and the one measurement that changed how I work. The line Six plugins, all JUCE 8, all VST3 plus standalone, all GPL v3, all downloadable from esp-plugin-store.vercel.app : Plugin What it is Basic Oscilator three oscillators on juce::dsp , the first thing I ever built, kept honestly VERTEX dynamic range compressor with a live transfer curve ESP-L1 brick-wall limiter with pre and post spectrum overlay MEGACRUSHER distortion, saturation and bit-crusher, three algorithms SPECTRUM real-time analyser, 2048-point FFT, spectrogram and 3D waterfall SYNTH/1 16-voice wavetable synth, unison, step sequencer, FX rack, interactive EQ That table is in the order I wrote them, and the order matters more than any single plugin. Each one starts roughly where the previous one ran out of framework. What juce::dsp actually hands you Basic Oscilator is three oscillators, three LFOs, a bit-crusher and a master gain. Almost all of it is the juce::dsp module doing the work: juce :: dsp :: ProcessSpec spec ; spec . maximumBlockSize = ( juce :: uint32 ) samplesPerBlock ; spec . sampleRate = sampleRate ; spec . numChannels = ( juce :: uint32 ) getTotalNumOutputChannels (); for ( int i = 0 ; i < 3 ; ++ i ) { oscillators [ i ]. prepare ( spec ); lfos [ i ]. prepare ( spec ); lfos [ i ]. initialise ([]( float x ) { return std :: sin ( x ); }); } masterGain . prepare ( spec ); That is the whole contract of the module. Prepare everything with one ProcessSpec , wrap your buffer in an AudioBlock , hand it to a processor as a context: juce :: dsp :: AudioBlock < float > block { tempBuffer }; oscillators [ i ]. process ( juce :: dsp :: ProcessContextReplacing < float > ( block )); juce::dsp::Oscillator takes its waveform as a lambda, so the three waves are three one-liners: case 0 : osc . initialise ([]( float x ) { return std :: sin ( x ); }); //