Missing VST3: Ubuntu - JUCE - Code::Blocks

Linux
1

Hi

New user here so I’m probably just doing something wrong! I’ve had a good search around the forum and Google but haven’t been able to find anything that helps.

I’m using: JUCE 6.1, Code::Blocks 20.03 and gcc on Ubuntu 20.04

I’ve created a new 'Audio Plug-in project using Projucer named ‘Hello’. I set it up to export to Code::Blocks (Linux) and I selected VST3 and Standalone as the Plugin Formats. I added Plugin MIDI Input and Plugin MIDI Output to the Plugin Characteristics and I added the ‘-fno-pie’ flag to both the Extra Compiler and Extra Linker Flags.

When I save the project in Producer it creates the Code::Blocks project which I can open and build without any errors (I get 1 warning about an unused variable). The build process creates 2 files in the ‘bin/Debug’ directory: ‘Hello’ and libHello.a . Ubuntu reports that ‘Hello’ is a shared library (application/x-sharedlib) and that libHello.a is a AR archive (application/x-archive).

I can run ‘Hello’ from a terminal and I get the standalone version of the plugin i.e. a window displaying ‘Hello World’ so far so good. however I can’t seem to find the vst3 file anywhere, I was expecting a file called Hello.so (maybe) but I’ve searched the whole computer and that doesn’t exist.

Is the libHello.a the vst3 plug-in but just getting mis-understood by my Ubuntu? I’ve tried copying libHello.a to /usr/lib/vst3 (and various other things) and my host DAW (Reaper) can’t see it. I wasn’t able to get the JUCE’s AudioPluginHost to work so wasn’t able to try it with that.

Any ideas?

Thanks for reading
–Ian

2

At the moment the Projucer’s CodeBlocks exporter does not support building VST3 plugins. It should be possible to build them with the Makefile exporter though. Alternatively, you can use CMake to generate a CodeBlocks project which can build a VST3 plugin:

cmake -B cmake-build-codeblocks -G CodeBlocks -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -D JUCE_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -D JUCE_BUILD_EXTRAS=ON
cmake --build cmake-build-codeblocks --target AudioPluginDemo_VST3

This will generate a VST3 into cmake-build-codeblocks/examples/Plugins/AudioPluginDemo_artefacts/Debug/VST3/AudioPluginDemo.vst3.
To set up your own plugin build with CMake, the example in examples/CMake/AudioPlugin might be helpful.

3

Thanks for the reply reuk

I added a ‘Linux Makefile’ exporter to the Projucer project and am now able to build the vst3 and load it into Reaper.

In a terminal: cd to the /Builds/LinuxMakefile directory under your project hierarchy and type ‘make’

One thing to note was that on my first build, the linker failed and I had to add ‘-fPIC’ to the ‘Extra Compiler Flags’ section for Linux Makefile in Projucer.

–Ian