Plugin for Mac?

[sedersmith]

Hi team, I just decided to rewrite my plugs made in FS with another software development tool to be able to export audio units for MAC. Unfortunately, I'm not good in coding, graphical programming was brilliant, but I have to give it a try.

Could anyone who did this already share the experience which way is better, what software to use, where to start from?

Regards,
Seder Smith

[smithclarkson02]

Probably vst4free or bedroomproducers blog. Plugins alone won't make you sound more original. Even if you use some wild plugin you'll sound different than what you used to but now you're sound the same as everyone else using the plugin. You have to become inventive to truly sound different, or stumble upon some obscure sound-gooder plugin that no one else has found yet.

[guyman]

I don't know what this dude is talking about above, I think he's in the wrong forum - but I'll chime in. I don't program plugins or know a written programming language (outside of flowstone's dsp code, and some ruby) - so I am in the same boat.
But after a couple years of building hundreds of schematics/tools/synths with flowstone, I have spent a considerable amount of time researching the best course of action to embark upon professional development, and from what I can tell the best route is:
C++ and JUCE. Juce is a development platform, and libraries for C++ development of DSP tools. From what I can tell if someone know C++ it's fairly straight forward to create a tool in JUCE, and bounce to all plugin formats (AU,WINVST,MACVST,1,2,3, etc).
That being said I know that C++ is difficult to learn as it is lower level to the computer than languages like python, swift, or ruby- but it's FAST, and can create a structure to deal with signals like we do in dsp/blue in flowstone.
I understand a bit of computer science and I find my self brilliant at signal processing and sound mixing , but I am an idiot savant and know no code. I don't know if it's worth the investment of time at this point in my life to learn what's needed to make the jump to full blown developer. I hope that's not the case for you, and if you choose to embark on this path, I pray you find success !!!

If you need someone to bounce off of, maybe we can chat and learn some more together since it sounds like we are in the same rare niche boat....

Hope that helps.

~That Guy

[pshannon]

Thanks for that explanation about a multi-platform framework called Juce. The licensing for selling your product seems very steep to me. I would never consider it with that kind of greed. On the flip side, there is a free version of it and it looks like a decent development framework to achieve your goals.
Look at companies who produce compilers for many different languages like Microsoft. They don't have these kinds of restrictions for selling your product. I have no goals of selling anything now or in the future, it is just all for fun.

Good luck,

https://shop.juce.com/get-juce

[tulamide]

As has been said before, there are not many possibilities.

1) Pure C++

That would mean starting at zero, creating your own functions and classes to deal with audio data

2) WDL/iPlug

The creators of the DAW Reaper once published the framework they used to create the DAW, WDL, open source. It is capable of creating multi-platform plugins and is nowadays alive through the framework iPlug, which builds upon WDL and is free as well. You still need a C++ development environment, and knowledge of the language C++

3) JUCE

Another C++ framework is JUCE. It works very similar to iPlug, but is much more advanced. It is also a commercial product. Not very expensive, Flowstone would cost a lot more over the years. But still to be mentioned. The free plan however is more than enough to get you started. You still need a C++ development environment, and knowledge of the language C++

As you can see, there is no way to go multi-platform without C++. JUCE has the most tools to help you with the first steps, but that will change with the upcoming version 6. iPlug is great (Youlean used it to switch from Flowstone to C++ for his now famous Loudness Meter), but much closer to standard C++ programming.