AGain in Python

Update: Things are moving on nicely with my first main attempt at wrapping the AGain demo included in the VST sdk to python using nothing but the standard python C API. So far I have everything implemented but the main process, for which I’ll need to do a bit more reading on the numpy C API. Most of this was possible thanks to an easy tutorial by Jun Du over at codeproject.com.

More updates (and source code of course) to follow soon.

Best software in the world, ever

This is a small post totally unrelated to vst plugin development, but I feel I need to share this discovery with any readers. SWTSG is a bit of software which makes the Star Wars opening text crawl with the Lucas Art’s and 20th Century Fox logos also. The results are nothing short of stunning, but you’ll need access to a mac to use it unless you want to port it (the source is freely available on the website). There is a tutorial on how to merge all of the bitmaps generated by the software into a video file, but I found it much easier to use Matlab to do it for me. Here is my little Matlab script contribution.

close all; clear all; clc
bmpDir = 'bmps';

aviobj = avifile('demo', 'compression', 'divx', 'fps', 25);
x = dir(bmpDir);
ofst = 4;
for n = 1+ofst:numel(x)
    frm = im2frame(imread(fullfile(bmpDir, x(n).name)));
    aviobj = addframe(aviobj,frm);
    disp(n)
end
aviobj = close(aviobj);

Put the bitmaps into a sub folder named “bmps” and then just run the script from the top directory. This will generate a Divx movie called “demo.avi”, which will look awesome and be about 8MB for 2 minutes of video using the ‘large’ setting in the SWTSG renderer software. If you don’t have divx installed, you can download it from here or change ‘divx’ to ‘none’ in the above script, although this will create a much larger file.

mingw update

I’ve just updated the tutorials to include the tools=[‘mingw’] flag in the environment setup. The tutorials would have worked just fine if you did not have Microsoft visual c++ installed, but if msvc is installed then Scons will default to msvc. This would have caused errors as the compiler flags are different in MinGW. All is sorted now and sorry if anyone was having troubles with their builds.

first 1k

Just went past the first 1000 visitors to this site today which isn’t to bad for a niche site which has been up a little over 2 weeks. Thanks to all readers so far. I’ll keep putting up the conent as long as there is an audience. Happy pluginning!!

Use at your own risk!

Hi all. The title of this site is somewhat misleading. Think of this blog as more of a public logbook than an authoritative tutorial. After looking here for the first time in ages, I have realised that most of the information serves to confuse, rather than to help newcomers.

I have moved all of the pages of this website into a single area called “old site”. Much of the material in there shows you the hard and convoluted way to do things. I have now been converted to using Microsoft’s compiler.

Maybe you’ll find interesting bits-and-bobs here but don’t take any of it too seriously.

Completed build tutorials. version 1

Finally got round to completing the last of my set of 3 build tutorials for the demos which come with the VST sdk. They are a bit scrappy in places and I’ll happily make any modifications suggested. Just leave a comment. The tutorials are available from the pages links over in the right hand column of this blog.

AGain tutorial v1 complete

Just finished another of my scrappy tutorials available under the pages link. I’ll move onto the more exciting GUI build asap.

Toolchain done

I’ve uploaded a page detailing how to set up your basic toolchain and I’ll get on to uploading the build scripts for the examples supplied with the sdk tomorrow or the day after 🙂

Hello World!

Hi all. Welcome to my new blog for audio programming enthusiasts. I’m writing this blog to help others start out writing their own VST plugins using the free MinGW compiler. MSVC is the compiler of choice for VST plugin development on Windows, however, I have found I’m learning a lot more while using MinGW. I am certainly not an expert at VST programming but I hope this site will help others to get over the painful initial hurdles of compiling the examples included with the VST sdk. Enjoy!