follower
commented
6 years ago Today's additional progress was what led me to decide to actually post what I've got so far...
Displaying a VST's GUI
I've managed to get multiple VST plugins to display their functional GUI within a standalone Qt application. What's particularly nice is that the approach I'm using doesn't require any Objective-C code to be written, we just need to pass around an opaque value retrieved via QWidget::winId().
I've got a more detailed write-up here but in summary:
// In a .ui file:
//
// <widget class="QWidget" name="vstTarget" native="true"/>
// In .cpp files:
auto wVstTarget = this->findChild<QWidget *>("vstTarget");
// ...
// Load the plugin (via QLibrary::resolve()) then...
auto winId = wVstTarget->winId();
_thePlugin->editOpen((void *) winId);
wVstTarget->setFixedWidth(_thePlugin->getWidth());
wVstTarget->setFixedHeight(_thePlugin->getHeight());
// Where `editOpen()` is roughly implemented as...
void editOpen(void * m_window) {
auto result = this->m_plugin->dispatcher(this->m_plugin, effEditOpen, 0, 0, m_window, 0);
// From LMMS:
struct ERect
{
short top;
short left;
short bottom;
short right;
} ;
ERect * er;
result = this->m_plugin->dispatcher(this->m_plugin, effEditGetRect, 0, 0, &er, 0);
if ((er->left == 0) && (er->top == 0)) {
this->_width = er->right - er->left;
this->_height = er->bottom - er->top;
}
result = this->m_plugin->dispatcher(this->m_plugin, effEditTop, 0, 0, 0, 0);
} Apparently on Mac OS X winId is (a pointer to) the type NSView.
The VSTs I tested with will quite happily allow you to interact with them, load presets, etc etc. Of course, I haven't tested anything sound-related yet but this seems like good progress :)
Here's a pretty picture:
Next steps
It would be good to get to a stage where there's some audio happening, so I'll probably keep hacking away at the VST plugin code base to try to get something happening with that. There's some Windows-specific thread/message-passing code in there so I'm not sure how straight-forward this stage will be.
Once I've managed to get some sound my plan is to look at re-implementing things in a less hacky manner in preparation for a PR (not for 1.2 maybe for 1.3 or 1.4). I think ideally the platform-specific code would be implemented as a (sub-)class or something but I suspect initially it'll be easiest to stick with the #ifdef approach of the existing code.
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Background
I had originally assumed that the reason for LMMS using WINE for VST (non-)support on Mac was because there weren't sufficient native Mac VSTs to justify adding native support. After playing with Helio Workstation I discovered that there's plenty of native Mac VSTs so I decided to investigate adding support for them to LMMS.
Progress so far
I've reached a point[1] where I think I've made sufficient progress that I wanted to keep track of development here--meaning that if I don't get to finishing it hopefully someone else can build on it without having to re-learn all of my lessons. :) (I've discovered a lesson I just learned was already in an unmerged WIP PR from someone else. :) )
The two parts of progress so far are:
Proof-of-concept for opening Mac native VST within Qt 5.5 application: https://github.com/follower/qt-vst-mac-native-poc (which might also be suitable for a Qt-based mostly cross-platform implementation).
Compilation of sufficiently hacked up versions of
vst_base,vestigeandRemoteVstPluginthat LMMS will startup, show the Vestige plugin, allow it to be dragged onto a track, display a file open dialog box, allow selection of an actual binary of a VST renamed with a.dllextension and then display the following error messages (without actually crashing):The final lesson I needed I eventually discovered had already been mentioned here: https://github.com/LMMS/lmms/pull/2393/commits/d7a63c5adda5d3878f033569453fed44e699e7e9#diff-0cfe54b7b7513b8854b14b3fb8411b78R115 (but, hey, at least I learned something along the way :) )
[[1] Context: I started writing up this issue maybe a couple of weeks ago and wanted to make it more "complete" before posting it but since that approach doesn't seem to be working I thought I'd just dump it in here now as is and then add to it as I get the opportunity.]