Hi! I’m new to JUCE; I just downloaded it literally this week. I’ve been hoping to use it to make audio plugins and study how they work, and I’m trying to follow this tutorial to get one set up for the first time, but I haven’t been able to get it to build. I use the Projucer to create an audio plugin as described by the tutorial, and I save it to a folder in my user folder and open it in Xcode, but when I click the build button, it throws the error “/juce_vst3_helper: No such file or directory”.
From what I can tell, the aforementioned file is supposed to be created automatically at some point, but I’ve looked where it’s supposed to be, and it doesn’t exist. And I don’t think I have quite the technical prowess to diagnose why. It also probably doesn’t help me that I don’t have any experience using Xcode (a lot of my past programming experience was in VS Code). I am using macOS Tahoe 26.5.2, Xcode version 26.6, and JUCE 9.0.0. I would appreciate any help y’all could provide.
When you say you downloaded JUCE last week do you mean via the website or GitHub?
I’m not sure what has happened in your case but a common issue can be a mismatch between the version of JUCE you are using and the version of the Projucer you are running. If you ever update JUCE (say by pulling an update using git) you should rebuild the Projucer and regenerate your project. Alternatively if you’re downloading JUCE from our website there will be a pre-built version of the Projucer included with the download you can use to regenerate your project. You can check the Projucer version number in the about screen.
The reason I mention this is the tutorial says to download JUCE via the website. If you downloaded it a week ago that would be JUCE 8.0.14, however you mention JUCE 9 in the title which was only released 2 days ago.
Also to be sure there is not some issue with your own plugin you can open some example plugins from the Projucer, select File >> Open Example >> Plugins >> AudioPluginDemo, when you select “Save and Open in IDE” it will ask you were to create the project, select an appropriate folder, then try building that project.
Let me know if any of that helps or not. If not we will probably need a bit more information in order to reproduce the issue you’re seeing.
At first I downloaded it from the website, but that wasn’t working either, so I deleted it and re-downloaded it from GitHub. I think the Projucer came pre-built either way, though. It’s saying it’s version 9.0.0.
I tried deleting the project and making it again (really slowly this time, so I could try and see what was going on), and it suddenly also started telling me to set JUCE_USE_CUSTOM_PLUGIN_STANDALONE_APP=1, and once I did that it mysteriously built successfully, which suggests to me that I must’ve forgotten to mark it as an audio plugin when setting it up. It still doesn’t seem like it’s building properly, though; Xcode says the build is successful, but AudioPluginHost doesn’t load the plugin, and I can’t find a .vst3 file anywhere in CoolPlugin/Builds/MacOSX/build/Debug like what AudioPluginDemo has. The juce_vst3_helper file still doesn’t exist, either. I’m noticing AudioPluginDemo has something different in the global preprocessor definitions field; does that have anything to do with anything, or is that unrelated?
Having looked at it some more, I still don’t know. I’ve tried selecting various different build targets in the Xcode project, and while the AU and the standalone build fine by themselves, anything involving the VST3 Manifest Helper fails to build, and it continues to tell me I don’t have the juce_vst3_helper file. AudioPluginDemo, on the other hand, builds just fine. I have no clue where juce_vst3_helper is supposed to come from.
I figured out what I was doing wrong. When I was creating the plugin, I kept creating it as an audio application. Which is a different thing. I’ve gotten it to build properly, and everything seems to be working as it should.
