HOWTO use Juce on 32-bit Windows

OK, I’m going through this adventure which is in the grey area, nowhere on the website mentioning whether 32-bit is usable, or that it’s not.

PROJUCER:

OK! I got a build and a running executable of Projucer on Windows 7 32-bit. I opened the director …\juce-6.0.7-windows\JUCE\extras\Projucer\Builds\VisualStudio2017 and opened Projucer.sln in Visual Studio 2017.

Then, right-click on Solution ‘Projucer’ and select Properties at bottom of menu.

Then, select Configuration on left menu, then “Configuration Manager…” on upper-right.

Then Platform–><New…>–>Win32 .

Then close everything and F5 will build it without error and it runs.

EXAMPLE PLUGIN

Tutorial 2 doesn’t say WHAT type of project to make. I tried plugin. Some gotchas: 1) Since Projucer throws away all norms of Windows GUIs it’s no longer clear what’s editable, what’s not, etc. But you can edit Project Name. (It appears greyed out, a sign in most GUIs that it is insensitive and uneditable.). I changed from NewProject to Tutorial2. The page doesn’t mention changing the Module Path but remember to change it to your install directory for the huge JUCE zip, which has inside it a directory module. Your input here should end in JUCE/module.

The rest of this page doesn’t show anything like what I get on Windows 7 32-bit after creating a plugin project (which is why most tutorials are specific about what they tell you to create: so that what you get actually looks like the next illustration). But going to a File Explorer I see the directory has, under Builds, the Visual2017 directory I requested, with a sln file.

Clicking that opens the solution fine, but it’s 64-bit (x64) not 32-bit (Win32).

Changing this is tricky. Right-click on Solution Explorer–>Solution ‘Tutorial2’ (3 projects)–>Properties…(bottom) → Configuration Manager… (top right).

You see a matrix of three projects. For the first, under Platform, click …–> New platform->Win32, Copy settings from: x64, OK.

For the next two, do the same thing but uncheck Create new solution platforms before hitting OK.

Then, under Configuration Manager dialog’s Active solution platform go to Win32. Hit Close.

Now, make sure all three projects have Win32 with Build checked. The top of the window should say Platform: Active(Win32). Hit OK.

Right-click Solution ‘Tutorial2’ (3 projects) and do “Build Solution.” You’ll see about a dozen warnings of “unreferenced formal paramter” and “local variable is initialized but not referenced” but these seem OK.

As a result I’ve produced without error:

Tutorial2\Builds\VisualStudio2017\Win32\Debug\VST3\Tutorial2.lib
Tutorial2\Builds\VisualStudio2017\Win32\Debug\Standalone Plugin\Tutorial2.exe
Tutorial2\Builds\VisualStudio2017\Win32\Debug\VST3\Tutorial2.vst3

At this point, make sure the project Tutorial2_StandalonePlugin is bold (if not, right-click and choose “Set as Startup Project”). Then hit F5 and you’ll see a new window saying “Hello World!” I guess that’s your plugin!

Using the method above, the resulting project works at least as a StandalonePlugin while creating audio in response to MIDI. I haven’t tried the VST3 yet.

JUCE supports 32bit. not sure as a build machine (never tested).

Out of curiosity, what’s the use case for 32bit only machine?

I personally only have a Intel Atom based tablet that died on me. but compiling on it was horrible (I worked at least in JUCE4.x days)

To be clear, I’ve been using it exclusively to build 32-bit standalone. It works fine, with the only problems being that the main zip file doesn’t include Projucer in 32-bit, so I had to compile myself, and, the projects it issues on Visual Studio are set up for a 64-bit build but no 32-bit build.

The use case is simple: my Windows dev box is 32-bit. I have some 64-bit laptops I can compile a 64-bit build on when it’s time to ship my software, but I want to do 99% of the typing, debugging, etc. on this 32-bit box, and I also want to supply a 32-bit plug-in to anyone who needs one.