After the plugins came the programs around them. This second look back is about the standalone applications I wrote in the Delphi years — most of them tools I needed myself, published in case they were useful to someone else.
Host the host
A whole family of tools treated VST plugins themselves as raw material. The VST Plugin Merger glued two or more plugins together into one, complete with a new common GUI. The Split Plugin Creator ran two instances of a plugin against a split signal — Linkwitz-Riley crossover, mid/side, transient/residual, front/back and more — with up to 16× oversampling around them. Its little sibling, the VST Plugin Oversampler, kept just the oversampling part for plugins that produce non-linear distortion.
WinAmp, of all things
Before ASIO interfaces for lab software, I warmed up with something more playful: a Winamp VST Host that let WinAmp load any VST plugin as a DSP effect, plus an ASIO output plugin. With roughly 3000 different VST plugins in the wild the bridge could never be perfect, but it went through seven public versions and taught me a lot about other people’s assumptions.
Eye candy with a purpose
Not everything was audio. The Buddha Brot renderer grew out of optimizing the Graphics32 Mandelbrot example into a full Buddhabrot fractal renderer — the technique famously described by Melinda Green in 1993. It was my gateway into serious 2D graphics performance work, which turned into its own thread of my life (a later post will pick that up). And the filter-bank based Third Octave Analyser — also available in a Goertzel-algorithm variant — quietly foreshadowed the measurement tools that deserve their own chapter.
Like everything in this series, the Applications page and its subpages still host the originals.