The official Developing VSTs thread

Hi all,

I wanted to start a thread were we can drop knowledge in regards to building/developing VSTs or applications related to music.

I myself am a web developer/programmer by day (C#.net amongst many other languages) and have some light experience with C++ (for you++) lolz. Anyways, I'm straight up diving into learning how to build VSTs.

Done some research, and will post up some useful resources and findings as I go along, and hopefully, provide you guys with some cool shit.

Anyways, if any of you have had experience, know of someone, or are yourself are a developer and want to tag along, please share!

Also, even if you are just a music nerd and not really a developer, that don't mean you can't contribute! Design, ideas, usability, etc. are all valuable when it comes to designing apps....so please dont be afraid to chime in.

peace!

Here are some resources I've found along my learning travels. Some good stuff:

some drag and drop vst creation tools:
http://cycling74.com/ (max - nym has just started to muck with this)
http://synthmaker.co.uk/
http://synthedit.com/

nice forum with vst development topics:
http://kvraudio.com/

Cyrus, no mean to thread-jack but I do have a wonderful idea that could bring you some dough.

PM me please. I am willing to pay for your services.

ive done a couple vsts / audio units.

it's not too hard to transfer between the two...the biggest hurdle was the ui. it seemed just a little more 'automatic' when coding for audio units.

also keep track of where you declare your variables...if you do it in the wrong place you can get weird glitches.

dont do something twice if you can do it once and then reuse it.

never forget that math is your biggest ally here. if you can accomplish something using a dsp formula instead of doing a bunch of manual moving things around, you'll almost always be better off in terms of robustness and processing.

mike feel free to hit me up too if you want, maybe cy and i can tag team.

also not really vst-related, but one of my favorite audio languages is chuck.
dead simple and the golden rule of chuck is sample accurate TIMING. very useful.
i personally don't like graphical programming languages (PD / Max), but chuck is like the perfect introduction to real sound programming. there is a gui front end you can manipulate too but that is mac only (called MAUI).
http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
^^pretty amazing for building your own samplers / synths to do exactly what you want.
^^also about the most useful 'live coding' interface - if you are into that sort of thing.

tapedeck wrote:if you do it in the wrong place you can get weird glitches.

yeah lets have lots of those! more of that!