Any plugin programmers out there? Sony?

H2000 wrote on 4/23/2005, 3:45 PM
There is an awesome free VST plugin called Senderella, which was written by a guy for Tracktion. It allows the sending of audio between instances of the plugin. More specifically, this plugin directly addresses Vegas' lack of ability to send from a bus to another bus or an FX bus.

Unfortunatey, I have tested it and while it sounds like it's working, it has glitches in the rendered output. These glitches appear on the buffer boundries.

After letting him know about it, he went over the code but couldn't find anything he saw to be a problem. He figured it was something in the way the Sony apps. render. Now, the good news is that he posted his source code. The bad news is that I don't know enough to fix it. Which brings me to my request for help. This would be a great plugin for anyone using Acid or Vegas. If anyone at Sony would be willing to help, that would be great too.

Comments

canum wrote on 4/25/2005, 9:34 AM
Hi H2000,

Can you post a link to the source code?

Thanks,

canum
H2000 wrote on 4/25/2005, 9:50 AM
Here's the link:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=77794&highlight=

It's about a third of the way down the page where he just posts the entire source code.

I'd really love to get this thing working.
PipelineAudio wrote on 4/25/2005, 1:00 PM
AWESOME!!!
canum wrote on 4/27/2005, 3:57 AM
I took a look at the source code and I don't see anything immediately apparent in the send/receive code. I'll try it this evening in a couple of different hosts and see if the glitches are still there. This would at least narrow it down to Vegas' renderer.

canum
H2000 wrote on 4/27/2005, 3:35 PM
great, let us know!
canum wrote on 4/27/2005, 9:13 PM
The version that builds from the sources seems okay in Sonar and Audition... there's a problem in Vegas like you stated in the first post. On the surface it seems like an input buffer underrun, but I'd need to play around a bit to see why. Delay pre-compensation in the Vegas audio engine maybe? Stay tuned...

canum
canum wrote on 4/28/2005, 3:36 PM
Anybody have a clue why you can't download the VST SDK from the Steinberg site anymore?

canum
H2000 wrote on 4/28/2005, 3:48 PM
I just downloaded it last week. I had to give 'em an email address and then they sent me a link.

I'll send it to you if you want.
randygo wrote on 4/28/2005, 3:53 PM

I just downloaded the SDK from Steinberg yesterday, but today I see the link is broken as you say.

By the way, don't even try to use the SDK with the latest version of MINGW. I spent hours yesterday trying get Steiberg's sample VST to build and deploy but to no avail. As a last resort I downloaded the older version of GCC and BinUtils that are packaged with Dev-C++, ran the same makefile and the VSTs were recognized by Vegas.

Now if I can only think of some cool plugins to create....

Randy
canum wrote on 4/28/2005, 4:02 PM
Thanks Randy. I'll try again later...

canum
randygo wrote on 4/28/2005, 4:14 PM
Once you get the SDK from Steinberg here are a few links that will save you a lot of trouble if you would like to use the free GCC compiler.

1) Get Dev-C++ Version 4 (Not Version 5) here:

http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html

2) Set up a path to \dev-c++\bin

3) Follow the instructions here (except use "make" rather than "mingw32-make"):

http://www.u-he.com/vstsource/showone.php?id=17

You should be able to modify the makefile included in the example above with a few obvious changes to support your environment.

As I said before, steer clear of the latest version of MINGW (which is part of Dev-C++), as I could not get it to work with VSTs. They would build, but mysteriously not work. Perhaps there is a simple fix, but I found nothing on the web, nor do I have the patience to start debugging the tool problem.

Randy
randygo wrote on 4/28/2005, 4:30 PM

Hey, try this other link:

http://www.steinberg.de/Steinberg/Developers483b.html

I was able to click through the license agreement and get to the page where they ask for your email to send you the download link.
randygo wrote on 4/28/2005, 4:36 PM

Or this:

http://www.steinberg.de/agree.php?id=1
canum wrote on 4/29/2005, 5:23 AM
Randy,

Thanks for the links and the advice. I'll try later today.

canum
randygo wrote on 4/29/2005, 11:58 AM
Here is something else really interesting I discovered today if you want to start playing with VST programming.

I've been a Java programmer primarily for the last nine years and thought it would be great if I could work with Java for VST programming. I realize that Java wouldn't be the best choice for a production implementation, but it would be great for prototyping and experimenting with algorithms!

There is a wrapper available that will allow VST plugins to be written in Java and hosted in any VST host:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jvstwrapper/

I just tried this out and it works with the Vegas 6 demo, provided you set CloseNativePluginWindow=0 in the plugin's .ini file. Otherwise, Vegas will crash with an access violation error in sfvstwrap.dll.

I have not tried it out with Vegas 5 and DirectiXer yet.

Have fun programming!

Randy
canum wrote on 4/29/2005, 12:00 PM
Randy,

I'm mostly C/C++ guy but it'd fun to give this a try. Thanks!

canum
canum wrote on 4/30/2005, 8:31 PM
Still can't get the VST SDK from Steinberg... anyone know whats up there?

canum
H2000 wrote on 4/30/2005, 9:24 PM
canum,
email me and I'll send it to you.

ziggly wrote on 5/2/2005, 2:57 PM
Hey all
quick question for H2000
theres a plugin called mixbox by tobybear its part of the utiliy bag bundle. its donationware and free to download at http://www.tobybear.de/p_utilbag.html
haven't tried it yet. would it work similar for your purposes?
H2000 wrote on 5/2/2005, 4:35 PM
hey ziggly, thanks. Yes, it would work similar to Senderella, except that I tried it and it has the same problem in rendering.:-(
Ben  wrote on 5/2/2005, 5:05 PM
I wonder if these rendering problems have anything to do with the UAD rendering problem we're experiencing - ie, something seems to be up with Vegas 6's rendering engine. Though I assume you've tried it under VST in ACID 5 and had the same problem?

canum wrote on 5/3/2005, 5:42 AM
This is a tough one. I made a couple of changes that I thought would help isolate the problem, if not fix it, and I still get the gapping. I don't use UAD, so thats factored out. Senderella does seem to work well with Sonar and Audition... it's only Vegas it has a problem with. I'm not giving up though...

canum
Ben  wrote on 6/4/2005, 10:23 AM
Hey Sony/Peter - any chance you could help these guys out with this? It'd be great to get these send plugs working with Vegas...or of course you can just give us sends from busses ;-)

Just been playing with these plugs and it is very frustrating - they ostensibly work until you check out the render; as stated above these are full of glitches.

Thanks

Ben