Algorithms

Why use our algorithms?

Speed up development

Employ immediately available code to reduce development time, costs, and risks.

Use everywhere

Achieve maximum reuse by relying on thouroughly-optimized plain C code with no external dependencies.

Use anytime

Enjoy our liberal and unlimited licensing model, free of vendor lock-in and hidden costs.

Documentation

Access the technical documentation right from this website.

Community

Comfortably get notified of all updates, follow the latest developments, and get involved.

Support

Want customization? Need to offload development? We can assist you with custom support.

Speed up development

Developing great audio DSP algorithms is notoriously hard. It requires not only extensive mathematical and coding skills, but also deep knowledge in a wide range of fields such as signal processing, electronics, and psychoacoustics, as well as familiarity with domain-specific issues and techniques.

Putting everything together often takes much more effort than expected. Those algorithms then also need to be optimized, tested, debugged, and potentially adapted to specific target platforms, which further inflates allocated time and costs.

We've been doing all this for years and, despite our excellent track record in taking the pain away from our customers, we've grown tired of those hardships too. That's why we chose to develop and offer you an ever-expanding catalog of reusable and adaptable algorithms to speed up the most time-consuming parts of audio programming and save you and us time and money.

As far as the effectiveness of this approach goes, the numbers speak for themselves:

>80%
less DSP code
in all projects so far

Case study: Just Pedals 1.0.1

818
SLOCs of
custom DSP code

20,425
SLOCs of
reusable DSP code

96%
less DSP code

Indeed, our algorithms are designed so that programming audio engines mostly reduces to defining modules, interconnections, and parameter mappings, leading to a workflow that conceptually resembles visual programming languages and modular synthesizers.

Furthremore, they are designed to maximize

ease of use: their APIs are simple, minimal, and boringly consistent, so that there is very little to learn and developers can get productive in no time;
ease of integation: they stick religiously to non-opinionated design principles and are provided as simple header files, thus allowing for high interoperability and never getting in your way; and
code correctness: they fully implement contract programming, allowing to catch bugs much earlier and thus reducing total development time even further.

Use everywhere

Unlike many libraries and frameworks that are based on the latest shiny tools or rely on platform-specific features, we chose to rather have our algorithms

stick to time-proven, ubiquitous, least common denominator technology (plain C99 with no external dependencies, not even the C standard library); and
packaged in the most neutral and easy-to-integrate way possible (single independent headers only defining static variables and functions).

This means that they are completely platform-agnostic and run unmodified on all today's platforms, ranging from cheap MCUs to web pages, including mobile and desktop.

We regularly test them on:

Daisy Seed
(STM32, ARM Cortex M7)

Android and iOS

Windows, macOS, and Linux
(x64 and Apple Silicon)

Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari
(WebAssembly via Clang, w/o Emscripten)

Optional C++ wrappers are however also provided for your convenience.

Use anytime

Relying on small technology suppliers and signing deals with them, no matter how good they and their products/services are, is complicated and risky. We get that. That's why we propose a liberal licensing model that makes it really easy and convenient to conduct business with us.

Our proprietary license, which is applicable to all our algorithms, has the following main characteristics.

It is unlimited: you are allowed to use our algorithms ad libitum in your products, with no limits on their number and type, number of developers involved, time, or territory.
You are allowed to make and own your changes and also keep them for youself.
It spares you from vendor lock-in to the greatest possible extent we can support: you are normally allowed to have third parties work with/on our code, as long as we keep track of them and — to put it informally — they have not caused us trouble in the past. Should our company run out of business, you can keep using and working with our code, so that our technology can safely outlast us.
Multiple confindentiality options are available: we can settle for keeping our contractual relationship fully confidential, or make it public after your product is released, or also make it public past a certain time, as long as conditions are the same for both parties.
Payments are one-off and upfront and there are no hidden or recurrent costs of any kind. Unlimited bug fixing is also included. Other forms of support are not, though, but we'll try to be as nice as possible.

For the most basic algorithms we also offer the option to use the GPLv3, so that free software/open source projects can use them without even having to ask.

So, to sum up:

Open source license

Free as in speech and beer
Any number of developers
No time limits
No lock-in
Only applicable to some algorithms
Only for GPLv3-compatible projects
No confidentiality
You must share your changes

Read the license text

Proprietary license

One-off payment, no hidden costs
Any number of developers
No time limits
No lock-in
Applicable to all algorithms
Any product, any number of products
Multiple confidentiality options
You can keep your changes

Read the license text

Documentation

All our algorithms come with full technical documentation describing their purpose and usage, as well as essential technical background information, including common API usage rules.

Check an example Common rules

Community

Support

Our primary mission is assisting customers in creating and improving their own products.

We would be more than happy to help you, whether it is about a simple doubt clarification all the way up to designing and implementing new custom audio engines from scratch.

Collections and bundles

Brickworks is our basic audio DSP toolkit that supplies you with the fundamental building blocks for creating and enhancing audio engines on any platform.

It consists of over 50 algorithms and is licensed as a whole, either under the GPLv3, free of charge, for free software/open source projects or under our liberal proprietary license, for just 3,000 € one-off.

It is fit for creating convincing equalizers, filters, compressors, guitar/bass multi-effect processors, subtractive synthesizers, and more.

Don't you believe it? Here are two examples created using only Brickworks algorithms and a cheap electric guitar.

Subtractive synth demo by Jean-Baptiste Arthus

Fuzz + cab sim demo

Explore Download Contact us FREE / 3,000 €

Brickworks Pro takes you to the next level.

This is an ever-expanding collection of state-of-the-art-or-beyond algorithms with advanced features for the most demanding applications. They can get you significant audio quality improvements even if you only strategically use them in critical parts of your audio engines, thus helping you position your products in the high-end of the market.

Given their high value, these algorithms are normally priced and licensed individually under our liberal proprietary license.

Explore Contact us

Type

Part of

bwp_arp_v2

bwp_env_gen_v2

bwp_hera_chorus

bwp_hold

bwp_ladder4

bwp_ladder4_ota

bwp_list

bwp_mini_vca

bwp_mod_func

bwp_note_track

bwp_omega

bwp_osc_pulse_v2

bwp_osc_saw

bwp_osc_tri_v2

bwp_phase_gen

bwp_sid_8580_filt

bwp_src_int

bwp_svf

bwp_trig_v2

bwp_voice_alloc

bw_ap1

bw_ap2

bw_balance

bw_bd_reduce

bw_buf

bw_cab

bw_chorus

bw_clip

bw_comb

bw_common

bw_comp

bw_delay

bw_dist

bw_drive

bw_dry_wet

bw_env_follow

bw_env_gen

bw_fuzz

bw_gain

bw_hp1

bw_hs1

bw_hs2

bw_iir1

bw_iir2

bw_lp1

bw_ls1

bw_ls2

bw_math

bw_mm1

bw_mm2

bw_noise_gate

bw_noise_gen

bw_notch

bw_note_queue

bw_one_pole

bw_osc_filt

bw_osc_pulse

bw_osc_saw

bw_osc_sin

bw_osc_tri

bw_pan

bw_peak

bw_phase_gen

bw_phaser

bw_pink_filt

bw_ppm

bw_rand

bw_reverb

bw_ring_mod

bw_sampler

bw_satur

bw_slew_lim

bw_sr_reduce

bw_src

bw_src_int

bw_svf

bw_trem

bw_voice_alloc