I've been using JUCE for a couple of years for VST development. I've found it to be a very well put together library for audio work (diving straight into Steinberg's SDK is pretty daunting for someone new to audio like myself), and a lot just works out of the box.
There is strong leadership from Jules on the direction of the library which is generally a very good thing, though it does mean that sometimes there isn't much room to budge on controversial issues. Font rendering is one aspect that several have battled with for a while, I've struggled to get good crisp smaller fonts without resorting to using freetype. Jules argument seems to be that small fonts shouldn't be used period, therefore the library wont render them well (I think there are technical as well as philosophical reasons for this, particularly on OSX). While I agree they should generally be avoided, there are certain situations where this isn't the case (reproducing an exiting GUI for a client, fitting non-critical text in when screen real estate is at a premium etc).
Overall I would certainly recommend for anyone starting out in audio development, but be prepared to fiddle around with fonts; I'm not so familiar with the non-audio parts of the library.
There is strong leadership from Jules on the direction of the library which is generally a very good thing, though it does mean that sometimes there isn't much room to budge on controversial issues. Font rendering is one aspect that several have battled with for a while, I've struggled to get good crisp smaller fonts without resorting to using freetype. Jules argument seems to be that small fonts shouldn't be used period, therefore the library wont render them well (I think there are technical as well as philosophical reasons for this, particularly on OSX). While I agree they should generally be avoided, there are certain situations where this isn't the case (reproducing an exiting GUI for a client, fitting non-critical text in when screen real estate is at a premium etc).
Overall I would certainly recommend for anyone starting out in audio development, but be prepared to fiddle around with fonts; I'm not so familiar with the non-audio parts of the library.