A little tip for avoiding frustration when compiling VST's

Audio Plugins
1

I wanted to make a Mac VST version of my plugin today and I thought I’d have finished that in 5 min. I kept searching for the whole day why it wouldn’t work. Ableton would simply not find my VST when scanning for VST’s.

Finally I found out that if I would rename (in Finder) the MyPlugin.vst file to xxxx.vst it would become a bundle icon, whereas before its icon looked like the icon of a folder. As soon as I renamed the file and the icon became correct, Ableton also found my VST!!!

Could anybody please tell me what was going on there? I spent hours (really frustrating hours) searching for any mistake and now I’m wondering what’s up with this need to rename the bundle to make it a working bundle? It must have something to do with the .vst behind the name because I never had this trouble when compiling some AudioUnit.

2

You’ll find a few posts with me ranting about this with AUs. There’s a flag somewhere in the project settings that forces it to turn the folder into a bundle, but I’ve no idea what voodoo is going on inside the finder to make this necessary.