I wrote the first two request in the feature requests at sourceforge, so I know that those two must be do as soon as possible.
At the beginning, it will perhaps not be very very nice, but it'll improve

I don't think I contradicted myself. But then you basically answered the point that context is important. Mass is a property of matter. The fact that we measure it in kg is an artificial scale we apply to it based upon a reference mass. Different masses plotted on a graph looks like a dimension - but actually it is the axis of the graph that is referred to as the dimension and not the mass.

Context is very important.

You can make a resizable view:

rect.right = width;
rect.bottom = height;

frame->setSize(width, height);
frame->draw();
(taken from the vst source code archive

you need to modify both the rect and call setSize(w,h) for it to work, apparently.

We do exactly the same thing with distances. At the end of the day, mass is energy, and distance (imo) would not exist without mass. I think of amplitude as energy. Perhaps it is really a velocity then and could be expressed using both time and distance. In that case it wouldn't be a dimension, but would be composed of two dimensions.
You could apply any scale to it, but it is definatelysomething more than simply time. Time alone cannot describe it. You can generate what appears to be amplitude using mathematical functions on time as we've said, but it doesn't just happen by itself - thats all totally hypothetical.
Something has to move over time to be able to observe it - be it electrical potential, or someones bumcheeks. So perhaps it is really a velocity or an acceleration, which would suggest two dimensions are involved.

Of course
You must change the rect because it is called in getRect and is the size of the GUI when the host opens it.

As soon as some fixes are made in the vu-meter - I forgot squaring the partial sum, double-buffering it, ... - I will finish my pseudo-host and make the spectrogram. I need the pseudo-host because I can't get vsthost or others capture winamp sound without making reverb - a problem in my config, but I don't have the time to check where it is -.

I thought about the freezing or the low motion. If you freeze the view and then restart it, I will probably have to clear the view, and then loose everything that was before. The low motion is nothing else than browsing the buffer, and it is easy to make it work with the freeze option.
For zooming, I still have concerns - I draw on a memory area, and I don't now if I can stretch the result -

To be able to zoom, you'd probably need some sort of double buffering (well actually probably treble buffering!), so that you can expand a portion of the image. Probably not the most efficient way of doing it though.
It would obviously be better if the enlarged image does actually show more information than the smaller one, although it would still be handy to zoom even if that doesn't happen, say 2x, 4x and 8x (or an interpolated zoom), for people with size challenged & resolution abused displays.

Yes, that could be a solution - a simple solution, but nonetheless efficient -, but one drawback would be the amount of memory required - everybody has at least 512MB, so it should be enough -

Can you recommend a good plugin? I like foobar's built-in spectrogram, but a good vst would be great.
I tried a few, maybe NuGen's Visualizer is the best, but you can't set it to display data horizontal.

At least for development purposes, I've found rs-met to be the only acceptable one. There are others that look nicer or have more features, but somehow I always go back to rs-met.

Dr. Cake, you should ask your question in the "What is the best..." forum.

This is a developer's forum, for people who enjoy programming and the math behind making VST's.

Also if you have a new question you should avoid adding to a thread that was 8 years old.

Now, if you wanted to ask about a plugin that provided finer low-frequency resolution than ones based on fft's, and with a faster response time than available ones based on variable-width windows and fft's, then ask away! (That's an area of interest for me right now).

Time Lord here! I came to 2012 to see if the original poster's request has been satisfied. It'd be great if something like this existed now, but if not, of course I could just as easily check back in 2020 after lunch!

Space Boy is still around (try a PM) but the last post of Miles1981 was at Fri Apr 29, 2011