awesome-musicdsp

A large collection of GUI-less plug-ins open source but supported via patreon

SynthOne is a great open source project built using Audiokit, that will be very interesting to anyone looking to build an iOS synthesiser.

A pretty amazing modular synth/composition environment with nice real-time visualisation, loads of modules, and lots of flexibility

The same thing in Blink (Google chromium).

From the creator of JUCE comes CHOC, an ISC licensed library of Classy Header-Only Classes. Including some useful audio related utilities

CSound is still going strong after many years. It can also be used as an embeddable DSP library. There is a

This is a framework from

AudioKit uses the Swift programming language. It's a high level DSP and UI toolkit for audio things. If you want to make apps for Apple's devices this is a great option, although if you want to do more low level, custom DSP, you will still have to do some C/C++.

A smart new plug-in abstraction in C that targets VST3, AUv2, CLAP and Standalone formats on desktop. It's very new but a nice clean and minimal way to target multiple formats producing tiny binaries. Also includes hot reloading capabilities for the standalone targets.

Distrho Plug-in Framework is a nice C++ plug-in framework by falkTX, supporting lots of Linux formats.

A plug-in framework using the D programming language, that has had a huge amount of work over many years. I haven't tried it, but I've decided to include it here in solidarity with the authors. As a fellow open-source framework developer, it's nice if people know about your work.

Originally created by Cockos, iPlug is an awesome plug-in framework. For a long time, I was maintaining a

AudioFlux is a new-kid-on the block and some what similar but looks designed for deep learning, it looks very promising and has a liberal (MIT) license.

Essentia is a huge collection of MIR algorithms that you can use to extract high and low level features from audio. AGPL3 license. Somewhat painful to build cross-platform.

Librosa is a widely used Python library for MIR tasks. With a little help from my agents, i've systematically ported it to a C++ library with WASM and Swift Package to boot.

Claude Code marketplace for audio plugin development skills.

An audio plug-in that embeds a C++ JIT compiler which you can use to test your C++ DSP without leaving the DAW.

It's 2026 and it's the year of Agentic AI. I like using these tools on the command line, have you heard, i'm building

This is an online interactive C++ compiler, which can be a very nice and quick way to test out a particular feature of the language, without having to build a binary.

Compiler explorer is a great tool for checking the assembly code that different compilers will produce.

Max is a great environment to use for prototyping audio plug-ins. There are just so many options for integrating different technologies, I highly recommend it - even if nowadays most of the max patches I make only include a few objects.

This is an awesome online graphing calculator. Check out some interactive Casio CZ waveforms that I made

Bela is a wonderful little SoC + Audio Interface which is pretty revolutionary, allowing super low latency audio and sensor I/O all clocked together, in a tiny package. I wrote the FAUST support class for bela. You can also program it with C++ or libpd, and even supercollider.

Daisy is a brilliant programmable embedded music platform. A few different host devices are available into which you plug the

An embedded linux OS & dev kit that runs VST2 & VST3 plugins with super low latency.

Emilie Gillet's work is inspirational. The code has been

An open source pedal board project from a developer who did a lot of the DSP in the best plugins of the last ~20 years.

This is a programmable stomp box and eurorack module that I've been working with since the kick starter campaign to launch it. It's a really nice little unit, which you can program in C++, FAUST, Pd or with Max gen~. I find the limited interface with 4 controls makes me think quite carefully about what's important about my DSP algorithm. You can find some patches I made for it (using a mixture of c++ and FAUST) in the

A template for iOS/macOS AUv3 projects

Continuing the theme of self-promotion, here is the latest and greatest iPlug2 template project, set up with CI/CD, installer scripts, github workspaces etc.

Eyal Amir also has one which looks good!

An excellent template for JUCE projects.

Jan Wilczek has made another excellent JUCE template

Is an exciting new DSL created by Jules Storer and Cesare Ferrari, which also uses the LLVM compiler technology. It has a JIT compiler for a fast workflow and can spit out C++ and WASM and ready-to-go JUCE projects. Cmajor is an imperative language much more similar to C/C++/Javascript than FAUST. It has several advantages, for example multi-rate processing and in my opinion it is more suited for code that mixes event-handling with DSP, where as FAUST is good for discreet blocks of DSP processing. Since FAUST can output Cmajor code via faust2cmajor, you can use them together.

FAUST is a powerful functional DSL for audio DSP with many options for quickly compiling to different “architectures” including audio plug-ins and embedded devices. FAUST is not interpreted like programming languages such as Puredata/Max/Supercollider/javascript, it is