Checking on the status of opensource audio apps and plugins (previously known to me) is quite the sad sight, quite a lot of them have been abandoned 😔
I am thinking of tagging anything that:
1. has no stable release in 10 years
AND
2. has no single dev commit/change in 5 years
as "abandoned".
Alternatively if the project owner publicly states it is no longer maintained.
The amount of projects that fit into this criteria is not small. And I feel 10 & 5 year thing is quite generous..
@falktx Apps as in editors? ReZound, Sweep, mhWaveEdit, etc.?
@prokoudine well those are in a similar situation too, I think we can count with our hands the amount of maintained open-source audio editors.
I was thinking of more generic terms, for any standalone audio tool (like a synth) for "apps".
I did mention "apps and plugins" on purpose, standalone-only audio tools are not very common, luckily
@falktx Hi, how can I start learning audio software programming?, how should I start to make Linux audio plugins?
@albertyeah you can start anytime! First thing though is learning a programming language that can work for audio plugins.
C++ is the most common one and best supported overall while being quite tricky to get to know really well, while Rust is new and not yet so common but likely easier to start..?
So it all depends on your experience.
Anyhow, I make https://github.com/DISTRHO/DPF for dealing with plugins, but as usual documentation is a bit lacking.
@falktx great I'm actually learning C++ right now
@falktx Good point... what do you think happened? Not even LLMs could change that trend.
Related to this, I see a lot of JUCE based projects that seem nice in principle but if the author has not updated between versions (say using older JUCE6) it becomes difficult to package and argue in their favour.
JUCE breaks their API quite a lot, even between minor versions. So projects that rely on older versions don't have e.g. fixes for high-dpi screen support or linux vst3.
Updating them to new JUCE versions can be quite complex sometimes.
Not good prospective for long-tern support...