Environment for developing commercial plugins

[grichards]

Hi all,

I've been writing dsp plugins for a home-made DAW written in c++ for a long time, I'd like to start making plugins that I can sell. If you were starting commercial development:

What plug technology would use use? vst, which vst version?, audio unit and be mac only, etc?

Would you develop in c++, or use something else? swift on a mac?

Any thoughts very appreciated.

[random_id]

Look into JUCE and IPlug (version 1 or 2). These, to my knowledge, are the best options. They allow for cross platform and cross format development with relative ease.

[grichards]

Those look great, thanks!

[mystran]

What plug technology would use use? vst, which vst version?, audio unit and be mac only, etc?

Ideally you should write plugins that are portable and API agnostic internally, then wrap those plugins in whatever APIs you want to support. This is how frameworks like JUCE and iPlug work, but even if you choose to do something custom, I would still recommend some sort of an abstraction layer, because not only does this make it much easier to support multiple APIs, even if you only support a single API there is still typically a significant amount of API-specific boilerplate that is basically the same from one plugin to the next.

Would you develop in c++, or use something else? swift on a mac?

C++ really is the industry standard. If your primary goal is to develop commercial plugins and you already know how to write C++ then pretty much anything else is just going to make your life more difficult.

[BertKoor]

What plug technology would use use? vst, which vst version?, audio unit and be mac only, etc?

You cannot apply for a VST2 license anymore with Steinberg as a developer, so it's going to be VST3.
If you want potential clients to nag that your plugin is not available on their favourite OS

[grichards]

Thanks for the pointers! IPlug looks ideal, I'm up and running now. Exciting times!

Thanks again,

-Graham