Blue Cat's Plug'n Script V3 Released - Now with VST Plug-in Export!

[Blue Cat Audio]

We have just issued a maintenance update for Plug'n Script to fix a problem with exported VSTs for Mac.

So Please download the latest version if you want to create independent VSTs for Mac. It is available from the same location as the original download (link received by email upon purchase - you may have to refresh the web page).

[vanhaze]

That sounds neat, thank you very much BCA !

Warm Regards.

[ghettosynth]

Does "\file" have any meaning as embedded in comments of all factory scripts? There are no references to this, that I could find, in the manual or in the angelscript documentation.

/** \file
* Mini compressor.
* Soft compressor that operates in the non-dB domain.
*
*/

[ghettosynth]

You really should do an overhaul to the way users can upload and download custom made scripts.
I mean , the whole github thing is so unattractive, untuitive and user unfriendly.
It's really for people who are rocket scientists imho.
Why oh why use that dreadful github ?

Make a dedicated corner on your site for custom made uploaded scripts, neatly sorted in audio and midi fx, with a clear description of what a script actually does.
Please BCA.

Yes, we are aware the current solution is not optimal - we also need a way for people who are looking for scripts and people who can write them to get in touch in some way (we are getting many requests for scripts and we know there are many developers who would be happy to write them)... Any suggestion is of course welcome!

It says in the product description 'surround support (8 channels)'.
Is that an input limitation also? I'd like to build a mixer, and would love to have 32 or 64 input channels.... actually I'd need more than 8 outs too.

The current version is indeed limited to 9 ins / 16 outs (there is one more input for the side chain). That's indeed quite limited for a mixer, but how would you use such a plug-in? Most host applications do not support such a large number of I/O properly...

Reaper does though and I've also had need for something similar. There is some advantage to having a large mixer plugin that is external to the DAWs limitations. For me, 32 in/out would be useful. I think, with strange plugins like large mixers that they are the kinds of things that not everyone wants so it's more difficult to justify the development effort in a more traditional language and so it would be great to see that limitation improved in PnS.

[Tappistry]

Please forgive what's probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway:

How feasible or complex would it be to use Plug n Script to Rewrite old 32-bit freeware plugins as 64-bit versions? I have almost zero programming/scripting knowledge at this point, but it might be fun excuse to learn some AngelScript.

[ghettosynth]

Please forgive what's probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway:

How feasible or complex would it be to use Plug n Script to Rewrite old 32-bit freeware plugins as 64-bit versions? I have almost zero programming/scripting knowledge at this point, but it might be fun excuse to learn some AngelScript.

Freeware is not enough, they must be open source and the vast majority of freeware plugins are not open source. If they're open source, however, it's probably less work to just recompile them for modern environments than it is to port them to angle script.

[Tappistry]

Please forgive what's probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway:

How feasible or complex would it be to use Plug n Script to Rewrite old 32-bit freeware plugins as 64-bit versions? I have almost zero programming/scripting knowledge at this point, but it might be fun excuse to learn some AngelScript.

Freeware is not enough, they must be open source and the vast majority of freeware plugins are not open source. If they're open source, however, it's probably less work to just recompile them for modern environments than it is to port them to angle script.

Oh right, forgot about the licensing. I just looked at the license and it says "You are not allowed to reverse engineer this software."

My thought was to rewrite a couple of the old Variety of Sound plugins.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Does "\file" have any meaning as embedded in comments of all factory scripts? There are no references to this, that I could find, in the manual or in the angelscript documentation.

The comments were just made compliant with doxygen in order to generate documentation for the scripts, that's it. Comments are ignored by the script engine anyway, so you can just ignore them too .

[imrae]

FWIW, as someone who does other programming the Github arrangement makes this more appealing. It's a tricky one; if you don't know Git already then you might not want to learn it for this. But if you do know Git already then you absolutely will want to use it!

[Blue Cat Audio]

Freeware is not enough, they must be open source and the vast majority of freeware plugins are not open source. If they're open source, however, it's probably less work to just recompile them for modern environments than it is to port them to angle script.

You indeed need to make sure you have the right to reuse and modify the code from these plug-ins (and well, you need to have access to the source code anyway).

By the way in such a case you would probably want to use the "native" option and just recompile the algorithms as native dsp scripts - no need to "port" to Angelscript. And the performance would be much better too.

Of course recompiling the original VST can work, except that on Mac it is likely that the GUI part of it would not even compile (most old 32-bit plug-ins use Carbon that has been deprecated and does not exist for 64-bit). So it would not be irrelevant to wrap the DSP side of the plug-in into Plug'n Script, so that you can get a nice-looking GUI without too much work.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Reaper does though and I've also had need for something similar. There is some advantage to having a large mixer plugin that is external to the DAWs limitations. For me, 32 in/out would be useful. I think, with strange plugins like large mixers that they are the kinds of things that not everyone wants so it's more difficult to justify the development effort in a more traditional language and so it would be great to see that limitation improved in PnS.

It indeed makes sense for more "experimental" work. However it would have to be a different plug-in, as most hosts will just fail with too many I/O (it took already a while to get most hosts compatible with 8 ins and 8 outs - it used to crash!). Or would it work for you if it is only available as a configuration during export? You would do the testing inside Plug'n Script with a limited number of channels and export a much larger version...

[ghettosynth]

FWIW, as someone who does other programming the Github arrangement makes this more appealing. It's a tricky one; if you don't know Git already then you might not want to learn it for this. But if you do know Git already then you absolutely will want to use it!

I agree, and furthermore, I think that with the current release that there's not much point in distributing scripts to end users. Without VST export there might have been some interest from end users in just running scripts. Of course, creating that ecosystem where people are willing to fork over a cnote just to run freeware scripts is no light task, I think that you aren't really going to compete with the likes of Reaktor/Max at least in the short term. However, with VST export, I can't see much market for customers who aren't at least devs in a minimal sense.

I think that it's a fantastic product now. It is really the prototyping tool that I was looking for. I see no reason to move beyond github for hosting scripts and dev tools. I'd much rather see the effort put into improving the product for developers in the short term.

[Blue Cat Audio]

FWIW, as someone who does other programming the Github arrangement makes this more appealing. It's a tricky one; if you don't know Git already then you might not want to learn it for this. But if you do know Git already then you absolutely will want to use it!

You can actually also use GitHub without having any clue about git...

[ghettosynth]

Reaper does though and I've also had need for something similar. There is some advantage to having a large mixer plugin that is external to the DAWs limitations. For me, 32 in/out would be useful. I think, with strange plugins like large mixers that they are the kinds of things that not everyone wants so it's more difficult to justify the development effort in a more traditional language and so it would be great to see that limitation improved in PnS.

It indeed makes sense for more "experimental" work. However it would have to be a different plug-in, as most hosts will just fail with too many I/O (it took already a while to get most hosts compatible with 8 ins and 8 outs - it used to crash!). Or would it work for you if it is only available as a configuration during export? You would do the testing inside Plug'n Script with a limited number of channels and export a much larger version...

Yes, absolutely! That would work fine for my needs.

[ghettosynth]

Does "\file" have any meaning as embedded in comments of all factory scripts? There are no references to this, that I could find, in the manual or in the angelscript documentation.

The comments were just made compliant with doxygen in order to generate documentation for the scripts, that's it. Comments are ignored by the script engine anyway, so you can just ignore them too .

ah, doxygen, thanks.