Register/license by VST/AVID for custom PNS plugins?

[Marcelloz]

Hi all,
I made the first of a series of plugins using this fantastic product named Plug'n Script: nothing fancy feature-wise, just MIDI controls for external hardware to be used to manage external customized hardware via MIDI, with custom fancy skins and all that.
Has anybody gone through the process of licensing BCA PNS (or any other custom made plugin) with Steinberg and Avid so that plugins are widely compatible on any platform? Plugins will not actually be for sale as a standalone product, just in bundle with hardware.
Thank you for any tip to speed things up, before I sign up as a Steinberg/Avid developer, install everything and then realize that I should have done things differently!

[Blue Cat Audio]

Great! Welcome to the plug-ins developers community then!

There are a couple of PnS developers who have registered with both AVID and Steinberg. Several of them are quite active on the PnS users group on Facebook, so you may want to try to contact them there if you have an account.

I am not sure what you really want to know here, but the process is pretty straightforward, and you actually have to register with them before distributing any plug-in (even freeware). In the case of AVID it's not even possible to actually load the exported plug-in in Pro Tools if you are not a registered developer.

[Marcelloz]

Hi! Thank you so much for replying, I was in fact making a post in the FB group when I realized I had your reply!
The PnS users group on FB has been already precious to get it all started.

What I'm trying to do is: I will have those MIDI plugins ready to go with the hardware they manage in a few weeks, and I just want to make sure customers can load them into their DAWs as legitimate and licensed. I'm asking for tips on how to proceed, what kind of licensing and all that to save same time when signing up with Steinberg and Avid, to someone who already went through the process.

Thank you once again for PnS which really sped things up a lot, I am a CS engineer and I do have coding experience in some different areas, but without PnS I would either have had to dedicate a lot more time to the project - well, or hire somebody

[Dewdman42]

Do I understand correctly that a Steinberg VST2 license is required in order to distribute a VST built from PNS? For some reason I was under the (false?) notion that somehow I would not have to since I am not compiling with the VST2 headers.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Yes, my understanding is that you indeed need a license for the plug-in format, whatever the tools you use to create the plug-in.

[Dewdman42]

hmm, that defeats some of the reason I was using PNS.. sad news since I can't obtain that license.

[Blue Cat Audio]

You can still export VST3.

[Dewdman42]

In this particular case, VST3 has midi timing problems that will be problematic. Its not suitable for VST3 or else I probably would have done it in JUCE. In particular the plugin is inserting CC events into the stream on the same timestamp as other midi events....(including notes)...so the exact midi queue ordering needs to be preserved, which is not possible with VST3.

I'm afraid for now if that is the actual licensing situation, then I will just have to make the raw PNS script available for motivated people that want to purchase PNS and use it. It's still a little bit of a hassle to talk them through the Midi.hxx include file path, they usually have to know how to tweak that for their own situation...etc.. Or I will just dump the VST2 version somewhere and let the chips fall where they may...Since I haven't touched the Steinberg SDK, I'm not sure Steinberg could really do anything to me...but I hear you...this is a dicy subject....

[Blue Cat Audio]

The midi.hxx header is always included in PnS, so I don't understand the issue. You can copy its content into your script if that's easier for you to distribute.

You can maybe ask Steinberg, but I am pretty sure they will ignore any request about VST2 as they are definitely trying to kill it.

[Dewdman42]

The Midi.hxx issue is that its located inside the plugin bundle...and the user may install their script anywhere they want, on the macOS under Documents somewhere usually, etc.. So in my case I copied the entire library folder into the user scripts area so that my user scripts all use the same relative path name as the factory example scripts "../library/Midi.hxx" and that works out fine, but I am simply sharing this script for free...I don't plan on helping anyone figure out how to make sure that script will be finding Midi.hxx in the right place...from inside the factory scripts area or whatever... and its different on Mac vs windows...too...

copy and pasting the include into the script is always a possibility but I'd sorta rather avoid that.

Obviously, exporting a VST bundles it all together so that they don't have to worry about it.

[Dewdman42]

You can maybe ask Steinberg, but I am pretty sure they will ignore any request about VST2 as they are definitely trying to kill it.

On this point, yes I have asked them several times over the past year or two, since I missed the memo to get grandfathered in with VST2 license, and got only one response a long time ago saying they will look into it. But basically, no I don't expect to be able to get a VST2 license...and in this case...it won't work properly as VST3. It can work as AUmfx if I can figure out how to export that, so far the one I tried to export as AUmfx didn't seem to send midi to the ports....so I was missing something in that step, not sure. But that really only helps some users, but its better then nothing...

this is not a commercial product, just a free shared solution to help people, so at some point its not worth worrying about Steinberg shenanigans.....but on the other hand...Steinberg may not ever even find out...hehehe.