Wormhole2 is a powerful, cross-platform (Windows + Mac) VST plug-in capable of transmitting audio between computers over networks. It allows effects chain routing between networked computers, boasts low-latency performance on LANs, and even works over WiFi or Firewire. But Wormhole2’s niche audience kept it from catching on more widely, and we hadn’t heard much from it lately, leaving some users worried Wormhole had fallen into a black hole.

plasq, the wonderful people who brought us Skitch and Comic Life, have been giving their audio tools new lives rather than orphaning them. We’ve already seen plasq’s live performance-savvy instrument and effects host Rax show up as an Audiofile Engineering product, and AE in turn recently promised in comments that great things were coming for Rax.

Now, we have some great news for Wormhole2: it’s gone open source:

Wormhole2 @ Google Code

Product Page and Features (still up at press time)

Discussion at plasq.com Forum

End users can just download AU (Mac) and VST (Windows) binaries, plus a PDF manual. It’s even a Universal Binary for Intel Macs.

Developers: because VST isn’t an open-source format, you have to download Steinberg’s VST SDK to use it, but plasq will actually go the trouble of sending you the files once you agree to Steinberg’s license agreement. (AU isn’t either, but Apple ships all the developer tools you need with the OS.)

I’m really hopeful someone will build something cool with this. You’ll need something else to route MIDI (though the Mac does that over networks out of the box, cough, Windows). But there are powerful audio-over-network options here which would be hard to work out on your own. It’s unclear how useful Wormhole2 will be to the existing, open source JACK audio project, which is also capable of routing audio between apps and (via netjack) networked computers. JACK uses a client/server model as opposed to Wormhole’s plug-in approach. But for end users, having both tools available free is a very good thing, and the price tag is an extra incentive to be brave and see if these tools can help power up your rig.

There’s something to be said for making connections in hardware studios: if you’ve got the cables, you can make it happen. In the world of the computer, it’s another story. The vision of Jack is to make routing audio between software as flexible. As the creators put it:

Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? If so, JACK may be what you’ve been looking for.

Previously, Jack lived primarily on Linux and Mac. But Stéphane Letz’s brilliant jackdmp implementation, which fully supports multiple processors (among other things), is now available on Windows, via Stéphane’s hard work. Even the Qjackctl graphical front end gets a port, thanks to Rui Nuno Capela. With all three platforms supported, it’ll be interesting to see what’s next — perhaps more development of netjack, the over-the-network rendition of the idea.

I think it’s also worth mentioning, after all Microsoft’s puffery about “innovation” for musicians in Vista, here’s something genuinely innovative and practically useful for XP and Vista alike. That’s not just to take a slam at Microsoft, either. I hope that these larger companies (all of them) will start to take notice of the value of some of these independent efforts of developers for the larger good. (Developers! Developers! Developers!) For OS development, it means better document your APIs. Be public about changes, earlier and wider. And install these tools, use, and test them.

jackdmp project, background, and details, for all three platforms