Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5AAX Native Programming Guide

The AAX plugin format is a third generation plugin API built on top of a prestigious pedigree of ultra-high quality plugin APIs including RTAS (Real Time Audio Suite, now obsolete for any version of Pro Tools past v10) and TDM (Time Division Multiplexing, the original DSP-based plugin API requiring DSP farm cards). AAX comes in two flavors: DSP and Native, the former requiring external DSP Integragted Circuits (ICs) along with DSP code and the latter running natively on the user’s CPU and written in C++. This chapter and book projects are for AAX Native plugins, which we refer to as simply “AAX” from this point forward. As a third generation product, its architects leveraged on lessons learned from the previous ...