• Christian Schüler (23/23) Apr 18 2005 Been recently thinking about writing a VST plugin in D.
• Lynn Allan (10/13) Apr 19 2005 Christian,
• Benji Smith (5/7) Apr 21 2005 Yeah, me too. I've been interested in tinkering with some DSP algorithms...
• pragma (31/52) Apr 19 2005 Personally I have no experience in writing plugins for VST, but I used t...

Christian Schüler <Christian_member pathlink.com> writes:

Been recently thinking about writing a VST plugin in D.

A VST plugin is a .dll for use with Cubase or other music software.
It has a specially named C function as entry point:

AEffect *main( audioMasterCallback audioMaster );

where AEffect is a struct, and audioMasterCallback is a typedef for a function.


1) How do I get these definitions into D? The VST SDK comes with an "aeffect.h"
that defines these types and some enums.

2) How do I build a dll with D?

3) I need to compile a "main" function with different parameters than just
(argc, argv). VisualC accepts an arbitrary "main" when compiling a .dll, but GCC
does not. Therefore, a common workaround with GCC is to call the entry point
something different, like "main_plugin", and change the export name with a .def
file into "main". Can D do one of these (compile an arbitrary main function or
handle a .def file)?

4) While the VST API is a C-API, in C++ you can derive from the AEffect struct
to add member functions, which helps in organising (instead of having a bunch of
static callback functions floating somewhere). Is this possible in D?

5) A "serious" plugin would need SSE code. I read DMD has it as inline
assembler, but this means writing a complete loop in assembler. SSE-intrinsics
(that is, specially named functions that compile to SSE-instructions) would be
more of a convenience.

Thanks,
Christian

"Lynn Allan" <l_d_allan adelphia.net> writes:

Christian,

This won't help you with D, sorry ...

But I would appreciate hearing about your experience with VST plugin
development. I've been working on a "skin/personality" to the open
source Audacity audio editor that is specialized for speech rather
than music. I would like to learn how to create several plug-ins for
Audacity, and hadn't found any examples or tutorials on how to do that
(didn't look that hard, however)


    Benji Smith <dlanguage xxagg.com>  writes:
Lynn Allan wrote:
 But I would appreciate hearing about your experience with VST plugin
 development

Yeah, me too. I've been interested in tinkering with some DSP algorithms 
(purely as a learning exercise), and I'd love to read about your 
experience writing VST plugins.

--BenjiSmith

 Apr 21 2005

    pragma <pragma_member pathlink.com>  writes: