Super Destroy FX Plugin Sources
These are some of the plugins that are part of the Destroy FX plugin pack. We support two plugin formats: VST and Audio Unit (AU). VST versions should be (nearly) source-portable to any platform which supports that. Audio Unit is a format exclusive to macOS and iOS. Some advanced features may not work on all platforms or in all hosts.
C++ is currently the only appropriate language for creating audio plugins, so all of these are written in C++. You will 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 Audio Unit SDK (for Audio Unit), and the VSTGUI library. Right now, this means that you'll be able to easily compile 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 Warning: Our source code repository often drifts out of date so that builds do not work; sorry about this. Tom doesn't use Visual Studio anymore and instead compiles with the free mingw toolchain (GCC).
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 unusual 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 Cakewalk 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 website:
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/
Sort of like a tape-loop with independently-moving read/write heads. Creates reverb-like effects with more variation over time. Enable Tomsound for extra glitches!
scrubby/
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 weird 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.
midigater/
A MIDI note controlled audio gate.
eqsync/
Total novelty effect that randomly 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.
freeverb/
Freeverb is a public domain reverb algorithm by Jezar at Dreampoint. There are several VST implementations of it, but no AU, so we ported it, and have made some improvements to it too.
fake-app/
A fake macOS application that associates icons with Audio Units and their preset files. Launching the app does nothing.
max-patches/
Very very ancient Max patches that we once upon a time exported and released as utility applications.
turntablist/
Turntablist is a record scratching emulation instrument by bioroid media development, but has since been abondaned. The author released the source code after abandoning it, and we ported it to Audio Unit, and made several improvements along the way. We no longer maintain it.
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 unusual 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 impulse 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.
fonttest/
non-audio plugin for testing rendering of our custom fonts
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.
thrush/
modulatable and channel-splittable phase shifter (a collaboration with Keith Fullerton Whitman)
In the source package, each plugin has a corresponding directory, as well as a win32 subdirectory containing Windows build files. In these directories, a file called "makefile" can be used from the command line to build the plugin.
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, thus technically directories appearing as files) 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 .lproj subdirectories accordingly.
Some of the external libraries that we use are included in our
repository as submodules, and you will need to populate these any
time you clone our repository or fetch/pull and see updates made to
the submodules. Do so by running the following command:
git submodule update --init --recursive
In order to build Audio Units, you need a Mac with Xcode installed. Xcode is available in the Mac App Store.
for building 64-bit Windows DLLs:
Tom is using mingw-x86_64 now, which is GCC targeting windows 64.
It's free software. I use it installed through cygwin (64), which is a
compatibility shim between unix and windows APIs. I recommend against
the cygwin compilers (e.g. "g++") unless you're trying to compile
software written for unix (Destroy FX plugins are not). mingw-x86_64
instead uses the native windows api (#include "windows.h" etc.) and
generates native windows binaries that don't depend on cygwin. Cygwin
here just helps us install and update mingw-x86_64, and also provides
useful unix tools like bash, make, etc.
From bash, you should be able to just run make from e.g.
transverb/win32 (or I run make -j 30 to run 30 parallel processes)
and produce dfx-transverb-64.dll. Because the build process has a
bunch of #defines, you generally want to make clean before
building a plugin; otherwise you might end up combining something
like "dfx-plugin.o built with Transverb flags like HAS_GUI" with
"some-plugin.o that doesn't define HAS_GUI" and get bad results.
It may also be possible to cross-compile windows DLLs from other platforms. I think it is possible to install mingw on say, linux, and the build process shouldn't need to run anything other than the compiler, resource compiler, and linker. I haven't tried it, though.
We are using C++17 features in DFX now, so you might need a pretty new compiler. This is known to work:
$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ --version
x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ (GCC) 10.2.0
Here is a description of each of the remaining directories in the source distribution:
dfx-library/
This is the library of common code that we use as a shortcut for creating new plugins and to generalize away all of the differences between the various plugin formats that we support.
dfxgui/
This is the library of common code that we use as a shortcut for creating the GUIs for our plugins, with a lot of common features included and hooks into the special DFX sauces. The library leverages VSTGUI as a generalized foundation for platform-specific GUI APIs.
docs/
The documentation for users. We include these in the binary distributions of our plugins.
fonts/
Some of our GUIs render text with custom fonts. Tom made these!
Divide By Zero Fonts
scripts/
Some scripts that we utilize during development.
site/
The files that comprise our website.
stub-dfxplugin/
Sources for starting a new plugin using our DfxPlugin framework.
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.
AudioUnitSDK/
Apple's Audio Unit SDK, required for building the AU versions of our plugins.
vstgui/
Steinberg's cross-platform and cross-plugin-format (despite the VST in its name) library for GUI creation. DFX GUI is based atop this.
vstsdk/
SDK from Steinberg for creating VST plugins. Required to build VST versions of the DFX plugins. There is no code in this directory; you should get the headers and class stubs from Steinberg's website.
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).
notes/
secret diaries