#MadeWithSlint

WesAudio's DAW Plugin

WesAudio, a leading manufacturer of professional audio equipment, recently revamped their exceptional products, _HYPERION and _PROMETHEUS. This launch included a complete redesign of their digital audio workstation (DAW) plugin user interface, enhancing the overall user experience and functionality. We're proud to announce that this redesign is #MadeWithSlint

We asked WesAudio owner, Michał Węglicki, to share his thoughts on the GUI for DAW plugins and his journey with Slint.

Abbreviations

• DAW: Digital Audio Workstation
• GUI: Graphical User Interface
• UI: User Interface
• UX: User Experience

Challenges: GUIs for DAW plugins

The main challenges are ensuring low CPU usage and updating the GUI rapidly. In DAW, the GUI operates in the main thread. Blocking the main thread can lead to glitches and affect the DAW audio processing capabilities, creating artifacts, a common problem in this product category.

Limitations: Previous UI

We were using VSTGUI, a simple framework and a good solution. However, implementing complex UX scenarios became a real challenge, requiring a lot of mediation layers that increased the complexity of the overall implementation. Performance was another limitation. This is a huge downside of VSTGUI, especially for higher resolution assets. A responsive GUI framework that could utilise the GPU became a necessity.

Goals: UI redesign

Being a hardware manufacturer with plugin control technology places us in a unique market segment. However, our UI design goals align with many in the industry. We believe that digitally controlled analog gear is the true modern solution to the needs of all audio engineers. We wanted to deliver a UI that would work flawlessly on the majority of systems, and would be designed in line with modern UI/UX trends.

Considerations: GUI framework selection

We wanted to create a middleware layer between the UI and the communication engine. This required a high-performance framework with multi-platform desktop application support. Frameworks dedicated for plugin development, such as JUCE, iPlug2, were out of scope. Only two frameworks met our needs - Qt and Slint.

Our evaluation was mostly focused on performance. We did PoCs on Windows and OSX which went really well. Credit goes to the Slint team who provided great support during those first steps. A straightforward license policy that a company of our size could comprehend and afford was another factor.

Implementing the new UI

Slint provided a good toolset and framework to fluently implement the UI provided by the designer. Very rarely did we struggle with “how to implement” scenarios. This kept the implementation phase really fluent and free from surprises. Slint allowed us to maintain our software requirements with legacy systems, which wouldn’t be possible with most of the major UI frameworks out there. Also the support that we received was spectacular!

Overall Outcome

The project took approximately 3 months because of the complexity of our business logic. What I can say is that the initial feedback from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive, so we believe it will help bring our products to the next level!

Journey with Slint

The performance of Slint gravitated us towards it and we are extremely satisfied! Our business logic is quite complex and there were a lot of surprises that came up during the redesign – but those were strictly due to our product complexity rather than Slint itself. As I’ve mentioned before, support has been spectacular. I personally believe that support is as important as the framework itself. I feel that the whole Slint team is strongly behind their product which translates to product success.

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