PluginParameters improvements, and introducing ExtraNotes

This morning I intended to "briefly explore" a concurrency bug in PluginParameters which had been bothering me ever since I started porting TeragonGuiComponents over to Windows. Although the demo ran great, and the framework required very little work to port to Windows, I was annoyed that the demo app was crashing on shutdown. This might normally be forgivable for a desktop app, but for a plugin this means that removing it from a channel will crash the host, so it's kind of a big deal.

Anyways, my "brief exploration" resulted in a full day of hacking PluginParameters, but at least now I've bumped the version to 3.0 and fixed a ton of bugs in the process. Also I renamed several classes in the library, since some classes were starting to get quite verbose (namely, ThreadsafePluginParameterSet is now ConcurrentParameterSet, which is still quite long but overall better). Unfortunately some concurrency bugs are still lurking in the framework, mostly having to do with calling set() or delete on a ConcurrentParameterSet directly after creating it. I would really like PluginParameters to be able to guarantee to the user that it is ready to do anything after the constructor returns, but unfortunately this is in practice very difficult to accomplish.

The good news is that in practice, a plugin should never need to call set() or delete on a parameter set immediately after creating it. However, I dislike shipping code with known bugs, no matter how small.

Anyways, I also made some progress yesterday on ExtraNotes, which is the renamed version of AUNotes. This will actually be the second time I've renamed the plugin; the name before AUNotes was "Notepad", which I think is far too generic and has poor search visibility. This name change reflects something bigger and more exciting -- the dropping of the "AU" from the plugin.

ExtraNotes will actually have an AudioUnit version, but unlike its predecessors, it will be available for other plugin containers (namely VST) and operating systems. A Windows/Linux port of this plugin has been on my wishlist for many years now, and I'm glad that I could finally do this using Juce and TeragonGuiComponents. Here's some preview screenshots:

Editing a note

Images are finally supported!

Yes, that's right! ExtraNotes will support importing images and store them in the note for you! This has been a looooong requested user feature, and using the Juce image framework, it actually wasn't terribly difficult to accomplish. The plugin will support two "tabs", so you can have both text and a single image. You can also import a text file from disk into the text tab, in the exact same way that you can load an image to the image tab.

Currently the plugin does not serialize the image during state save/restore, and although the text notes should, it's completely untested. I'm not sure how well Juce's XML serializer will deal with raw binary data like this, and I might need to serialize the image myself into a series of integers (yuck, let's hope it doesn't come to that).

So yeah, today I had originally planned to do Windows porting, and to be fair I did do some. The PluginParameters test suite now builds and runs on Windows, which is a big improvement, and the TeragonGuiComponents demo also is running on Windows without crashing (yay). However I probably won't have time to build Windows versions of the other plugins I did over Christmas, which means that I will probably end up doing a huge batch of releases sometime shortly after New Years.