Discover how UVI use JUCE for the development of cross-platform UIs

What does UVI do and what's its story?

UVI is a Paris, France based developer of sounds and software for professional audio production. Over the past two decades UVI has released an extensive catalog of instruments and applications.

From sample-based instruments to deep hybrids of synthesis/sampling, like in Falcon, and including FX plugins, we now have a wide range of products aimed at composers, producers, sound designers and musicians.

What is your role in the company?

I'm the head of product development, including software and sound departments.

I still write a lot of code for both software and instruments, but handle as well product design and help the marketing team with technical aspects of our products.

Your software runs across all platforms. What is your experience developing multi-platform software?

I started working at UVI 13 years ago and at the time it was a pain working on Mac with CodeWarrior and its dodgy behavior.

Tools are now much better and with consistent C++ support across platforms with VS and Xcode, it has become quite a pleasant journey.

The main issue with cross platform is still user interface and this is where Juce helps us a lot.

We used to have our own UI toolkit and it was quite time consuming to develop and support. Now we can focus on the core of our products, the audio and user experience.

You recently launched the iOS app BeatHawk. Was that built with JUCE? Will you release an Android version?

Beathawk uses the same engine and code as our desktop applications and is, of course, built with Juce for its UI.

No android version planned so far, but this is something that we are considering. The problem with this is mostly the audio latency which varies a lot between different devices. It is an important issue for the instrument we have released.

Android is still lagging a bit behind, but hopefully this will improve soon.

What do you most like about JUCE?

It's just simply works. It's very simple to use and and yet very powerful. Furthermore, the coding standards are quite high compared to most other C++ frameworks.

You can customize it very quickly and achieve complex UI’s like we did with Falcon.

Documentation is top notch, forum is quite active and the JUCE team is very responsive.

What do you most dislike about JUCE?

Not much actually. Like everybody, I would like the UI to always be blazing fast even if your UI is quite complex, especially on retina display.

What features would you like the JUCE team to work on next?

Faster UI. Maybe a dedicated API that would help this without writing dedicated non-portable OpenGL code.

What can you tell us about your next plans?

Basically more instruments and more FX.

Our goal is to offer a wealth of unique and inspiring instruments, the highest quality sound, efficient and reliable performance and world-class user interfaces.