WolfTalk: Podcast About Audio Programming (People, Careers, Learning)

Phil Burk has had an amazing career as an audio developer: from writing DSP code on Z80, through creating a music language, writing code for mobile phones, PlayStation audio support, and Android, up to MIDI 2.0 contributions. He’s also a co-creator of the PortAudio library, which is one of the most popular OS-agnostic audio libraries (and it’s used not just from C/C++ but from Python as well). He’...

Julian “Jules” Storer is the creator of the JUCE C++ framework and the Cmajor programming language dedicated to audio. He created JUCE in the late 90s, and it grew to become the most popular audio plugin development framework in the world. Apart from audio capabilities, it is a general-purpose cross-platform application development framework (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and embedded platf...

How do you become a C++ Standards Committee member? Why is C++ prevalent in audio? Should you still use it for audio software? Honestly, Timur Doumler is someone I have looked up to ever since I saw his “C++ in the audio industry” talk at CppCon 2015. He has a rich development history with C++ and/or audio: developer at Native Instruments developer of the JUCE C++ framework (podcast sponsor ❤️) C+...

Kurt James Werner, PhD, is a senior research scientist at Soundtoys and one of my favorite researchers in audio DSP (virtual analog modeling in particular). While you may not have read his papers, it’s very likely that you used one of the plugins he worked on: Neoverb Vinyl RX Guitar Rig (Hammond vibrato/chorus) Ozone Neutron Trash If you start peeking into the research of modeling analog audio ef...

Victor Zappi is a creator, researcher, and educator at the intersection of music, technology, and interaction design. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Northeastern University. In his career, among others, he worked on the Bela hardware platform during his time at Queen Mary University of London’s prestigious Centre for Digital Music (C4DM). In this episode, apart from...

Ilias Bergström is a software engineer, researcher, and musician from Sweden. For most of his professional career, spanning over 20 years, he has been working on, as he describes it, “time-based media software.” In the audio programming world, this means digital audio workstations, video editors, and live audio-visual performance software. He generously shared his experience in Audio Developer Con...

Geraint Luff is a seasoned audio DSP developer and the founder of Signalsmith Audio. Geraint’s presentations, such as “Let’s Write a Reverb” and “Four Ways to Write a Pitch Shifter,” are among the most popular talks at the Audio Developer Conference (ADC) thanks to Geraint’s clarity of explanation and easy-to-understand visuals (not to mention the accompanying open-source repos). In the interview,...

Orchisama Das is an outstanding audio researcher known for her work in virtual acoustics, artificial reverberation, and immersive audio. She holds a PhD from Stanford University’s prestigious CCRMA and has contributed to groundbreaking research at leading universities and major tech companies. During this interview, we talk about her path in academia and industry. Orchisama shares her thoughts abo...

Julian’s career is incredible: from natural sciences through a master’s in physical modeling, a PhD in virtual analog modeling, an almost decade-long position at Native Instruments, all the way to TikTok and Stability AI, where he’s working now on generative music algorithms. There are few people who have such a rich background in audio research and industry and even fewer who are willing to share...

Jatin Chowdhury is quite well known in the audio programming community for his numerous contributions: various open- and closed-source audio plugins, a few published research papers on Virtual Analog modeling, a few audio-related talks, especially at the Audio Developer Conference, insightful Medium articles on creating audio software in general, significant open-source contributions including the...

Dave Rowland is the CTO of Audio Squadron: a group of audio-related companies. More specifically, he’s the architect and the lead developer of the Waveform digital audio workstation (DAW) and an Audio Manager of Prism Sound (which focuses on audio hardware manufacturing). He’s also a very successful speaker, having given talks at conferences like Audio Developer Conference or C++ on Sea. Given the...

Gustav Andersson  is a Swedish senior C++ audio developer at Elk Audio. He has worked on their Sensus guitar featuring a rich set of controls, Elk Audio OS for embedded platforms, Sushi digital audio workstation, and Elk Live software for live music collaboration over the internet. Having studied Electrical Engineering and Digital Signal Processing, Gustav had been looking for a very long time to...

In this podcast episode, I was delighted to be able one of the most prominent people of the audio developer landscape: Fabian Renn-Giles. Fabian is a former lead developer of JUCE, currently working as an independent contractor. He has worked with many great companies (e.g., iZotope, Behringer) and has an incredible  portfolio . He is regarded as an expert of real-time, low-latency C++ audio progr...

Eric Tarr is a professor at the Belmont University where he teaches Audio Signal Processing. In the audio programming community, he’s most famous for his book “Hack Audio” on the basics of digital signal processing using Matlab and his point-to-point modeling library for analog audio circuit emulation. Eric’s work has definitely been an inspiration for starting the WolfSound blog and the YouTube c...

In this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Chase Kanipe: a cybersecurity professional, a musician, and an audio programmer (formerly C++ with JUCE, currently Rust). Chase is most widely known through his incredible Audio Developer Conference talks: Tips From a Hacker on License Checking at ADC22 Writing Elegant DSP Code with Rust at ADC23 (to be released soon) Both were really insightful an...

In this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Ruurd Adema: a freelance audio developer from the Netherlands working primarily in JUCE and C++ (but not only). I met Ruurd at the Audio Developer Conference 2023 and I believe his story is incredibly inspiring; he went from being a live sound engineer doing front-of-house (FOH) mixing at the biggest events in the Netherlands to contracting as a fr...

In this podcast episode, I was very pleased to guest Linus Corneliusson: a mixing engineer and editing assistant at Fascination Street Studios who has shifted towards audio plugin development. I met Linus (and his colleague Jacek) at the Audio Developer Conference 2022 and he’s definitely one of the most friendly and funny people in the community. What is even more amazing, he’s worked in the stud...

For this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Ian Hobson: a former DJ who transitioned to audio programming, worked at Ableton, and then launched a successful freelancing career. Ian is well-known in the community for his talks on Rust at the Audio Developer Conferences and on YouTube. He’s also created his own programming language: Koto. We met at the Audio Developer Conference 2022 and he w...

In this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Oliver Larkin: an audio programming legend from the UK. Starting with a passion for music, going through Max, SynthEdit, PureData, then C++ to JavaScript and others, there is no audio technology that's not known to him. He has worked on projects with Arturia and Focusrite (among many more) and nowadays works for Ableton. He has conducted resear...

In this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Christoph Guttandin: a web audio developer from Berlin, Germany. Chris is a self-taught programmer with a formal training as an audio-visual technician. He’s a freelancer who deals with playing back sound in the browser, sometimes on multiple computers simultaneously. He’s a member of the W3C Audio Community Group where he gives feedback regarding...

In this podcast episode, I was lucky to interview Jay Pocknell; a production and mixing engineer from the UK. Not only is he a skilled sound engineer and a lovely person to talk to but also a proactive member of the audio community. He founded the Sound Without Sight organization and currently works at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) advocating for music software, music hardwar...

In this podcast episode, you will learn: how Meinard Müller became a professor for Music Information Retrieval at AudioLabs in Erlangen, what are AudioLabs and how they relate to Fraunhofer IIS and the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, how professor Müller approaches doing teaching and research in his research group, how to learn doing research and how to collaborate with your supervisor (for maste...

In this episode, I was honored to interview Andrew Fyfe; a musician, a software engineer, and a researcher in the field of deep learning applied to audio. In particular, Andrew is working on an exciting new technology, Neutone. Neutone allows quick deployment of trained neural networks to audio plugins and running them in the digital audio workstation for verification, testing, up to full-blown pr...

In this episode, I was lucky to interview two members of GPU Audio: Jonathan Rowden and Alexander “Sasha” Talashov. GPU Audio is a software company that promises to deliver real-time audio processing capabilities to GPUs in the form of an easily usable Software Development Kit (SDK). It’s their goal to allow audio programmers to utilize the power of all GPU cores for faster and more performant aud...

In this episode, I was incredibly excited to interview Stefano D’Angelo: a freelancer in the field of audio programming. Episode notes: https://thewolfsound.com/talk009 Stefano comes from Italy and is well known in the field. He’s completed his PhD thesis at the Acoustics Lab of the Aalto University, then worked for Arturia for some time, and then decided to start his own freelance gig, which even...