vst-mac news • true cross-platform for the masses

26-01-2003

Crystal, which still holds the record in update frequency, has been
updated to 2.2

you can exspect the final release of (VST-i) and (AU) virsyn - tera
in about one week.

23-01-2003

20-01-2003

By your invitation, I'd like to add some little comment to
opinions raised on your site.
You write this :

"adding  (.vst) urs heckmann - MFM.
this plug-in is the first official release of a OSX-only VST standard
software.
it is not supported by carbon or cocoa applications other than
cubase SX, cubase SL, ableton live, arboretum montage, cake 6.0,
or utilities which process audio at systemlevel.
these plug-ins must be installed into the root´s or users VST plugin
folder to access them from within applications.
welcome  to unix."

The Unix is one of the most amazing parts of OS X.
It may look less useful when you're used to MacOS 7-9, but if only
you dare digging deeper, you'll soon notice what it all does for you.
- It gives you security, stability, performance and a load of
professional level applications (just to mention GNU apps) that hadn't
been available to the ancient OS.
On the downside for musicians, you currently loose access to
AKAI discs (until drivers exist), some drivers for hardware like the
Korg 1212 might never appear, and developers have to learn new
interfaces.
There had been that "carbonized" stuff around for a while which lets
MacOS X deal with a classic-compatible flavour of applications.
This has nothing to do in particular with "Carbon" which is one of the
two major interface layers of X.
Carbon and Cocoa will coexist for as long as OS X exist.
But that classic-compatible flavour, called "CFM", will die.
To retain future compatibility, all applications have to be transferred
to "Mach-o", which is what I call "OS X native".
In fact, Apple doesn't update those CFM things in the system any
longer. Mach-o is faster (i.e. by so-called "prebinding") and easier
to work with.
One part of it are those folder-style applications.
Hence, all those "carbonized VST" which in fact are "Carbon/CFM
based VST" will be obsolete one day within next 2-5 years.
Thus, "VST mach-o" is the future of VST on Mac and all applications
will have to follow one day. At the moment, I only know Cubase SX and
Sagantech Metro that support this. Havn't checked Melodyne, though.

"adding  (VST) blockfish ,spitfish ,and floorfish : 3 dynamics plug-ins
from digitalfishphones .
the OSX versions are (.vst) too, like MFM, what a suprise."

No surprise. Surprise is only that people don't know about this
allthough VST mach-o is around for some months. I think all of Cubase
SX's VSTs are mach-o. I had email contact with Ableton recently, where
they said, If only they'd known VST mach-o, they had probably put it in
Live for OS X, because it was easier to do.

And now to your concerns about AudioUnits.
No company says it will not support AU. The opposite is true.
Most companies say they will go AudioUnit.
Why is that?
First of all, we have a disgusting "wait-and-see" mentality.
Many companies, surprisingly even big ones, havn't even had a look
at AU internals but already claim "AU support committment" although
they don't know a s*** about it.
I think we'll see a nice movement on the market. Those who will have
slept for too long will have problems.
Others take the opportunity to break into the market, like TC with PowerCore and AKAI with their sampler. Well done.
First players, instant customer base.
You'll see a load of new independent developers, thus Free- and
Shareware. The development tools are free and very exiting. They come
along with every OS X 10.2 and above. You buy an iBook, you can have
built your first AU 2 hours later from the sample projects. Instant
action. No downloads, no buy this or that, no "Apply for license".
You even have good tuning-tools (CHUD) for free. Woah, this is the
wonderful world of UNIX and Open Source. - Of corse, the same tools
let you build AU and VST mach-o.
MacOS X 10.2 is the first major system that has everything audio out
of the box. It prevents hardware conflicts and it prevents software
conflicts. How often have you wondered why this or that VST works
well in one host but f***s up in the other? - This happens
when "standards" are not open.
OS X's CoreAudio and CoreMidi frameworks are very transparent
and well documented with loads of sample code for both host
and plugin developers. Welcome to the wonderful world of
standardization.
I had not been very surprised that Steinberg now offers some
detailed insight on request about how a host should behave.
Quite late, if you ask me.

And now Emagic.
I had been one of the first developers who had been
seeded with their VST porting library months ago.
I know that many developers adopted it. But one major hassle with
VST is, that allthough the processing stuff is quite open to plugin
developers, the optional user interface stuff is not (called "VSTGUI"). Latter couldn't be fully addressed by Emagic.
However, most VSTs utilize this optional stuff.
Those who don't, have no hassle porting their stuff. Those who do,
have to build their own user interface based on what OS X offers
(which btw. is much more than VSTGUI does).
meanwhile, I know developers like FXpansion who got it all working
in a way that a port from VST to AU takes less than 30 minutes
even with VSTGUI implementation.
I havn't adopted Emagics stuff, because I wanted to get more out
of AudioUnits.
And so I built my own graphics framework, which until now
helped lots of developers like DestroyFX and Antares.
Together with Airy Andre's efforts we now have equivalents to
VSTGUI which are not instantly compatible but offer quick and
versatile ways to customize user interfaces of AudioUnits without
bothering too much with Carbon's Human Interface Toolbox.
Oh, and DestroyFX have a open source library called "DFXplugin"
which lets you build VST and AU from one single project.

I don't know why we havn't seen much more AUs until now.
Some have been suspicious about bugs and preliminary things, but
these have nothing to do with AU development.
One pessimistic thought is, plugin developers wait for host
applications to arrive.
Logic's AU support in 5.4 and 5.5 had admittedly been kinda
problematic regarding graphics due to their remaining cross platform compatibility layers.
Their new engine which went into Logic 6 works flawlessly.
And then, there are hosts like RAX, Metro, AudioUnitHosting
(Apple's open source host), SynthTest and Melodyne (which I had
been seeded with with AU support in October 02!!!).

The lack of hosting applications is no excuse for not going AU.
In fact, host developers eagerly begged for alpha and beta AUs to
test and improve their AU engines. They now all support my graphics
stuff very well, because I had been early adopter. I took my chances!

Seeing it optimisticly, we havn't seen too many AUs now because
the developers want to get all out of this wonderful new world of
UNIX, CoreAudio and CoreMidi. - They must have heard Apple's
wonderful system built-in AUs like MatrixVerb which sound excellent
and are very performance friendly...

But soon, everything will be different. I will release a preview
version of Rumblence:zoyd, my new synthesizer AU within a couple
of days. Stay tuned.

;)  Ursurs heckmann
urs[AT]u-he.com
www.u-he.com