Thursday, January 24, 2008

big duh!

I've been a user of WinAmp for nearly its entire existence, and I never knew that buried inside it's preferences section is a whole damn programming language.

On the menu, choose Options -> Preferences -> Plugins -> DSP/Effect.

Select "Nullsoft Signal Processing Studio DSP" and click "Configure Active Plugin". Load a preset, and then hit "show editor".

Holy shit. I knew Winamp supported an entire plugin economy but I'd always just assumed that you had to use C to write them.

Editing the code changes the sound as soon as you type. It does not even wait for you to hit Save before it changes the sound. How many other coding environments in ALL of computing have that kind of instant feedback?

The obviously-not-coincidental similarity (look up "Justin Frankel") between this and the Jesusonic language built into REAPER means you could use Winamp as a rapid development environment for developing REAPER plugins. The fact that I knew about this stuff being in REAPER before I found out about it in Winamp is seriously ass-backwards.

This has been a surprisingly curse-filled post.

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