Digital-First
A lot of the audio plugin ecosystem revolves around emulating 30-60 year old analog hardware.
We don’t. We start from looking at the possibilities of digital audio - wildly broader than the capabilities of the most fabulous analog hardware of yesteryear - and take it from there.
Our user interfaces are clean, simple and aim to tell you with as much precision as we can put on the screen, exactly what the plugin is doing, and give you full control over it - with no learning-curve or deciphering cryptic controls and emulated knobs.
Call it the no-fake-walnut-grain pledge.
Platforms
Our audio plugins are currently Audio Unit v3 plugins for Mac OS os and iOS.
But one of the reasons for choosing a platform-independent language for all the code that does the heavy lifting is so we can port it easily. Future plans include iOS and VST versions of our plugins.
We have experimental VST versions of plugins that will be in beta soon - achieving the same quality and discipline in the user interface involves writing our user interfaces all over again using a different UI toolkit, and that takes time.
User Interface Philosophy
Our user interfaces aim for simplicity, precision and clarity - these are tools for professionals getting work done efficiently.
As you may have gleaned from the blurb on our plugins page, we take a dim view of Star Trek user interfaces - interfaces that try to look like analog hardware, or are simply weird for the sake of weird.
For our apps, as much as possible we aim to utilize the idioms and conventions of that users of the operating system we’re targeting expect.
DSP Code
Mastfrog’s DSP plugins have their DSP code written in Rust, a high-performance, memory-safe systems-programming language that is ideal for digital signal processing code. DSP code is both hard to write, and hard real-time. Rust’s memory and type-safety turn many kinds of easy-to-make mistake into compile-time errors that can’t possibly make it into production code. And, thanks to monomorphization and constant generics, its performance can sometimes surpass that of C, the traditional language for DSP programming.