Hi, just a quick question for people that have written code to host VSTs in their own plugin - how long has this taken? Is it fairly straightforward given we have the code for plugin-host to use as a basis, or are there plenty of problems and pitfalls along the way.
One major problem is that Juce (and various hosts) don’t support a dynamic number of plugin parameters. You need to decide beforehand some maximum amount of automatable parameters you are going to support and then implement a mapping from those parameters into the hosted plugin(s) parameters.
I’ve just come across this thread. I was about to post suggesting that a tutorial on hosting plugins would be really cool. I have the host in the extras folder as an example, and I think the program Element. I’ve found rather few examples.
But, regarding knowing the number of parameters beforehand, in my project I’m following the system of Hermann Seib in SAVIHost: the user places my plugin in the same folder as the target plugin and changes its name from, e.g., XENabler.vst3 to XENtargetplugin.vst3. On loading, my plugin queries the target plugin for its parameters, buses, etc., and replies to all queries from the host with the answers from the target.
NB it doesn’t work yet.