KVR Audio

Alatar · Post by **Alatar** » Mon Jun 18, 2018 3:38 pm

I was wondering:

How do I validate my VST plugin? I heard, there is a tool by Steinberg, which does that?
If yes, what is the tool called?
My goal ist to make sure, that my plugin does not behave badly. And that it can be loaded by as many DAWs as possible.

I also found this useful thread on Juce.com:
https://forum.juce.com/t/anouncing-plug ... tion-tool/
Someone made a tool, which validates plugins

Are there any other validation tools, which you use and recommend?

davidguda · Post by **davidguda** » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:55 am

That tool on the JUCE forum looks great, I will for sure start to use that for my projects.
Other than that I use AUval from apple... it just as it name suggests just test AU not VST for most plugin code is overlapping anyhow so still a good sanity test to run even if you would just release a VST.

Alatar · Post by **Alatar** » Mon Jul 02, 2018 5:25 pm

Thanks DavidGuda.

And to answer my own question:
When you download the Steinberg VST SDK, there is a tool called "VST 3 Plugin Test Host". It only seems to work on VST 3. But it does have an option "Plugin Unit Test". It can load VST 3 plugins and performs various tests on them. If anything goes wrong, it is going to log the error for you to review later.

So that is exactly what I am looking for.
Anyone knows, if there is a similar tool for VST 2?

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Jul 02, 2018 6:25 pm

It's probably worth keeping in mind that you can actually pass the "auval" tool quite easily with a plugin that implements very little beyond pure placeholders that just report success. There's a few properties for which you need to do a bit more, but passing "auval" still requires a fraction of the code that's actually necessary for even a simple pass-thru plugin to work at all in any host (and that's before even accounting for different hosts expecting different things).

Anyway.. in my experience if you test all the stuff you do with FLStudio, Live and Reaper (at least on Windows; maybe substitute some Apple host for FLStudio on OSX), then there's a good chance that it'll work in other hosts too, because these three do things different from each other and tend to expose corner cases pretty well.

lorcan · Post by **lorcan** » Mon Jul 02, 2018 7:27 pm

Alatar, try this one also https://sdk.steinberg.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=46, it's the Cubase/Nuendo validator.

Validating VST?