The Audio Programmer Podcast

Future Audio Workshop founder Gavin Burke joins The Audio Programmer to talk about what it takes to sell audio plugins in 2026. Gavin has been building plugins since 2005: modeling the Jupiter-8 and Prophet V as one of Arturia's first employees, serving as CTO at Output during Arcade, and releasing Circle, SubLab (the best-selling instrument on Plugin Boutique) and now Notes. We get into why pitching Notes as "a new way to play chords" missed and how customer feedback is reshaping it, why he held off on Claude Code until it fixed a months-old macOS bug in five minutes, why his team doesn't write unit tests, paid ads vs. influencers and the new manager layer, what he'd do in a plugin's first 30 days, Serum 2's free upgrade and Unreasonable Hospitality, and why Circle 2 was his real "difficult second album."

Guests: Gavin Burke (Future Audio Workshop)

Sonic Lab founder Sinan Bokesoy joins The Audio Programmer to ask whether coding still matters when AI agents can write it for you. After 15+ years of building audio plugins, Sinan now has Claude, Codex and Gemini write most of his code, yet his latest instrument still took 18 months, because the AI can't hear. We get into his real workflow: prototyping ideas before porting them to JUCE, cross-validating AI models to catch bugs, running Unity 3D visuals inside JUCE with WebView, why one-prompt, vibe-coded plugins aren't real products, the true cost of building with AI, and what new audio developers still need to learn. An honest look at audio development in the AI age.

Guests: Sinan Bokesoy (Sonic Lab)

Karanyi Sounds founder Dani Karanyi joins The Audio Programmer to break down what actually sells audio plugins, and why most never do. We get into pricing and why you cannot win the race to the bottom, the marketing funnel behind a real plugin brand, why email quietly out-earns every other channel, a candid take on piracy and DRM, building an audience from day one, and where AI still falls short in plugin design. A refreshingly honest look at the business behind the plugins.

Guests: Dani Karanyi (Karanyi Sounds)

Josh sits down with Max Shafer, co-founder of Just for Noise, on building an AI foundation model for drum and sample generation. Max shares the origin story — from a drum machine that wouldn't turn on and 20 minutes lost hunting for a single kick, to reframing the problem as generating samples on the fly. We get into designing an intuitive interface beyond the "empty prompt box," building a proprietary dataset by ripping drum machines in studios across LA, New York, Berlin and London, and the pivot from plugin company to a licensable infrastructure/API layer.

Max also opens up on the funding journey — contacting ~170 investors over three months at roughly a 1-in-100 yes rate — why he preferred VCs over angels, and his candid caution that raising isn't right for every company. Plus the music-tech landscape, community-driven beta testing born in the Audio Programmer Discord, and how AI can support rather than replace the creative process.

Guests: Max Shafer

Inside Google & Samsung's open source spatial audio project, Eclipsa Audio. Jani Huopinen (Product Lead, Eclipsa Audio at Google), Scott Kramer (Founder, Greenfield Sound; former Netflix Sound Director), and Klaus Trelby (immersive music engineer/producer, Marshmallow Skies) discuss how IAMF — the royalty-free immersive audio format from the Alliance for Open Media — is bringing spatial audio to YouTube, Android, Chrome, and beyond. Topics include the Eclipsa DAW plugin, comparisons with Dolby Atmos, dual audio for dialogue control, the film/TV pipeline, and what success looks like for open source immersive audio.

Guests: Jani Huopinen, Scott Kramer, Klaus Trelby

What does it actually take to get your audio plugins up and selling? In this episode, Josh sits down with Tobias Madsen from Moonbase to talk about the business side of plugin development - the part most developers find harder than the code.

Tobias shares his journey from building plugin stores and licensing systems for companies like Yum Audio and Black Salt Audio, to turning all of that experience into Moonbase - a platform now powering over 200 audio software businesses. They cover the real challenges of selling plugins, what a modern business stack looks like for plugin developers, and where things are heading next.

Guest: Tobias Madsen (Moonbase - https://moonbase.sh)

More at theaudioprogrammer.com

How do you actually get started with DSP? Josh sits down with Sam Fischmann, technical co-founder of Musik Hack, for a wide-ranging conversation on practical Digital Signal Processing - what it is, where to begin, and how to build audio software with clear, expressive controls that don't require a doctorate to use.

Sam makes products for artists, musicians, producers, and audio engineers at Musik Hack, where the philosophy is to keep the user experience simple even when the underlying signal processing is complex.

Guest: Sam Fischmann (Musik Hack - https://musikhack.com)

More at theaudioprogrammer.com

Join the ADC team as they discuss the 10th anniversary conference featuring 85+ speakers, new game audio track, expanded diversity initiatives, and global expansion to cities worldwide. Registration and more info: https://audio.dev

Matt Robertson is a 3x Grammy-nominated composer, arranger, musical director, and now software developer. His career began while working in UK recording studios in the 90s and early 2000s, doing studio maintenance and learning how records were made by some of the best in the business. He has contributed to records by The Prodigy, Lamb, Dido, Emiliana Torrini and Anoushka Shankar, and worked on live shows for artists like Bat for Lashes, Bjork, Anohni, Arca, The Cinematic Orchestra, and Ellie Goulding as musical director and orchestrator / arranger. StageBox is a new standalone plugin host and setlist manager for keyboard players, designed to simplify performance and provide studio quality sound on stage. Grab StageBox now: https://www.tracktion.com/products/stagebox

See the full presentation here: How can we create a JUCE-based plugin with a complex, visually appealing user interface that fills an 8K monitor at the refresh rate? Let's talk about the history of JUCE rendering, recent efforts to improve matters, and where it might all be going.