Hello. Tried to search for this but difficult to find a good phrase to search.
I’m working on a plugin and it’s at a pretty good, stable state at the moment, and I have been using it in my own music projects.
Is there a good workflow / easy way to duplicate or ‘fix’ the plugin at a certain point, so future builds won’t overwrite the version used in my Ableton projects?
I tried literally copying the vst3 package, renaming within the plist file etc. but Ableton still seems to views it as the same plugin after a rescan.
Is your goal to be able to load both the old and new version in parallel? Or do you just want to make sure that the current state of your plugin project won‘t get lost and that you can always restore that state? For the second case, if you aren’t doing so anyway, I‘d advise you to start a using a version control system like git, where you can easially save incremental changes to your code and always can restore your project in its current state to re-build the plugin in its „old“ version (and every version in between)
I guess I was just wondering how others handle this kind of thing; ideally I would like to be able to load two separate versions in parallel, not necessarily in the same project, but to avoid the hassle of restoring/rebuilding etc regularly. Although I do use git, I am quite often switching between working on music, and developing the plugin.
Although I couldn’t get two versions working by manually duplicating the vst3 package, perhaps I might be able to copy the package into a temporary folder and switch the versions around that way when I need to.
The host doesn’t use the binary name nor location.
Instead it is identified by the triplet consisting of three groups of 4 characters:
Plugin type - Manufacturer code - Plugin code
For your use case I would recommend to alter the plugin code by one letter for the development version.
The drawback of having the different plugin codes, you cannot move the saved data from the dev version to the released.
Oh, and if multiple instances are found, the version int is used to figure out the newest one (some simple hosts might simply use the first one found, IDK).
