The ADC 2024 conference wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to share my thoughts. The conference was a highly informative and engaging event that brought together experts in the field of audio development. It featured a range of sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities that provided valuable insights into the latest trends and technologies in audio development.

There were lots of developers (with about 450 in person attendees) from all types in the audio industry, though very much focused on DAW and Plugin development. There were several sessions on deep focus of C++, DSP principles, as well as Computer Architecture, which enforced how the conference is geared towards highly efficient compute driven implementations.

The Conference was broken into two parts, with Day 0 being a day of Workshops – 3 hour blocks with Hands-On programming or development with a highly knowledgeable presenter – and 20 minute “lightning” sessions. Day 1 and Day 2 were more traditional 1 hour sessions organized into 3 concurrent tracks. Each of the Days had an ending Keynote, with various activities like Open Mic Night and Quiz Night through-out. Poster and Vendor sessions were held through-out the day and conference, and between sessions and well into the evenings were plenty of Networking opportunities to meet and share information with fellow developers.

There was a lot of focus on C++ and Plugin developments, which is good, but I think the conference could be made better and more relevant to me if there was more focus on aspects that are part of my current audio focus. For instance, there was little in terms of spatial audio (though the Spatial Audio Primer was a very outstanding talk), which may be because it’s not quite reached critical impact in the general community. ADC 2022 had several sessions on DDSP, ML, and general AI presentations from vendors like Supertone, but while this year’s conference talked a bit about AI, it still wasn’t a predominant topic. And 2 years ago new development technologies like C-Major, RNBO, and GPU Audio were introduced, but this year it didn’t feel like there were potential industry transforming technologies that were introduced.

This is the first year the conference was in Bristol after moving from London. Bristol is a good place away from London for the conference, but the venue was just a bit too small, especially the social aspects, with the hallways being a little cramped and claustrophobic. The length of the of the conference and number of tracks was good, with it being just the right length and number of tracks so that something interesting was always going on.

Here’s a collection of Notable Sessions that are worth checking when the YouTube videos get published:

“High Performance WebView User Interfaces” - Arthur Carabott

A technical deep dive into high-performance webview implementation.

“A Critique of Audio Plug-In Formats” - Fabian Renn-Giles

A thought-provoking discussion on the challenges and limitations of plugin development.

“Crunching the Same Numbers on Different Architectures” - Marco Del Fiasco

An insightful exploration of the complexities of developing audio algorithms for different hardware architectures.

“A Spatial Audio Primer” - Emma Fitzmaurice

A comprehensive introduction to the principles and techniques of spatial audio processing.

“Wait-Free Thread Synchronisation With the SeqLock” - Timur Doumler

A detailed examination of the use of seqlock for wait-free synchronization in audio applications.

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Overall an excellent conference, a great venue, awesome technical ideas to learn from, and a wide variety of developers to talk with! I hope that I get a chance to meet you at this conference next year!