VST.NET: Awesome.
I dig a lot of electronic music, and I'm interested in the guts of the technology used to make it. I was looking around the interwebs a few minutes ago for a copy of the Virtual Studio Technology specification for audio plugins (used by Ableton Live, my digital audio workstation of choice) and stumbled upon something way cool: VST.NET, an implementation of the specification for use with .NET applications. Ihaven't checked out Mono for VSTs on Mac OS X, but I'm curious.
The VST spec has a lot of problems--my senior project was going to be a DAW with a "wire"-based interface a little bit like Propellerhead Reason, using VSTs as the primary source of effects, and it was awfully ugly--but it can be used by open-source software, unlike certain other audio standards. I'm looking at you, Audio Units...
More on VST.NET
Hi,
I came upon your blog post and wanted to thank you for blogging about VST.NET. I'm the author ;-)
VST.NET does something to cleanup that dog-ugly native VST interface. The VST.NET plugin Framework provides an interface based layer that structures and groupes related features together into interface definitions. A plugin developer can use the Framework to accellerate development by using some of the base classes that come with the framework. The framework provides facilities for plugin Programs, Parameters and Persistence. There are a couple of code plugin samples.
VST.NET also supports the host side of the VST specification. But at the moment it does nothing more than allow you to load and access unmanaged plugins from managed code. Nontheless, this provides a door into writing fully managed VST host applications.
Interested? Come and visit http://vstnet.codeplex.com and download the binaries, the samples or the source code. There is also documentation available (.chm download) that documents the source code and the samples as well as explaining some of the principles VST.NET is build on.
Grtx,
Marc Jacobi