How I got here
I have decades of sound design research I've made through the years for my own work and I decided to start putting it out in plugin format. Most of it I made using modular software but I realised a lot of it could easily be done in C with the new advances in programming and LLM models. In their old form they were cumbersome to run and required a bunch of setup and never fully integrated with a DAW. It wasn't enough to just convert them with an AI though, they were complicated machines and required GUIs which LLMs are traditionally totally shit at. I had to create a way of engineering them so the architecture was fast, elegantly coded and not bloated with the usual defensive crap that LLMs create.
Since I started doing it, the quality of the code has improved so much this is starting to be less of a problem and I can just concentrate on the design and look, as long as I properly set out the architecture and shape first. I was using JUCE, which is what most people use because there's a lot of work to make a cross platform backend, but it didn't sit right that they charged at a certain threshold. That, and my PDA, was what started the creation of SND. It turns out what I ended up creating is less bloated and faster than JUCE and has advantages, but it doesn't include any DSP, which was fine because I was writing my own library anyway.
The next stage
Now I've created a decent library of about 15 plugins I am getting the licences to actually start releasing them. That means getting the Apple and Microsoft developer certificates sorted. Nobody notices this part when it works, and everybody notices it when it doesn't. An unsigned plugin on macOS gets stopped by Gatekeeper and it's a PITA to get around. An unsigned installer on Windows gets a red warning that most people, sensibly, do not click through.
What comes out first
My playable filter is coming out first. Following that will be the n-dimensional VAE drum machine and some phasor models I've been working on.
Watch this space.