Phonique

Phonique is a macOS app for building AVAudioEngine graphs visually. You drag out sound sources, mixers, effects and outputs, wire them together on a canvas, and hear the result immediately.

It came out of a frustration I keep running into. Some APIs hand you a box of components and leave you to assemble them in code, and AVAudioEngine is one of those — connecting sources to mixers to effects to outputs worked perfectly well, it just wasn't any fun, and you couldn't hear what you'd built until you'd built all of it.

The part I'm most pleased with is the export. You can drop buttons onto the graph to trigger things, and then Phonique will write out a complete Xcode project — the audio graph and the UI to drive it — so you can open it and run your app straight away. The visual thing you assembled becomes working code rather than a sketch you then have to reimplement.

That's the trick worth stealing from this one. A tool that only lets you try things out is a toy; a tool that hands back something you can ship is a tool.

There's a longer write-up on Medium: Phonique — a visual AVAudioEngine editor.