New Pro Tools plugin format: AAX

Audio Plugins
41

This is great news Jules! Are you able to give us a rough ETA for when the AAX wrapper might be available?

We’ve got to try to judge whether to implement one ourselves internally, which we’d obviously rather avoid if you’re doing one yourself, but if its going to be months and months then we may need to just get on with it ourselves - it seems to be something the users are very keen on getting. I think Avid have done a great marketing job on it.

Paul

42

I can’t give you an ETA, and I’m currently juggling work on AAX with other things… I’d like to start publishing what I’ve got pretty soon though, so if you want to speed things up, you might be able to help with it (which I suspect would work out quicker for you than writing your own version…)

43

I’d like to start publishing what I’ve got pretty soon though, so if you want to speed things up, you might be able to help with it

Yes - that would definitely be an option.

Roughly when do you think you’ll be ready to publish what you’ve got & what areas do you imagine might still need some working on / will have been implemented by then?

44

Will try to get something out within a week, but no promises!

45

Great. Please could you post in this thread when you’ve published it and we’ll get it down. Ta.

46

Ok, I’ve started checking-in now. Don’t get too excited though, I haven’t even persuaded PT to load the plugin yet!

47

Great stuff Jules - thanks a lot for getting into this. We’ll give it a try on one of our systems here.

48

Hi Jules,

Thanks a lot for that check-in.

One of our programmers downloaded that latest stuff and tried out the AAX wrapper on Windows (Vis Studio 2008, Windows 7) and here’s what he’s come back with…

[quote]What i did:

  • included juce_core.h for juce_windows definition
  • included <windows.h>, not sure of juce alternative with the demo source
  • changed PlatformUtilities::setCurrentModuleInstanceHandle to Process::setCurrentModuleInstanceHandle
  • switched project compile flags from /MT to /MD
  • linked up to the AAXLibrary.lib

so now I have one linker error left…

1>AAXLibrary.lib(AAX_Init.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol “long __cdecl GetEffectDescriptions(class AAX_ICollection *)” (?GetEffectDescriptions@@YAJPAVAAX_ICollection@@@Z)
1>.\Release\JuceDemoPlugin.aax : fatal error LNK1120: 1 unresolved externals[/quote]

Of course its work in progress - you might find some of the comments useful.

So, what’s the plan going forward? Is this something that you’re going to be continuing with at your end in the short-term?

49

Thanks, I’ve not even thought about trying a Windows build yet, but those steps sound about right to me. I think the link error is probably just because GetEffectDescriptions needs to be declared as a __cdecl (and possibly extern “C” as well).

I’m working on this and a couple of other things right now, juggling them as appropriate, so sorry if AAX isn’t getting my full attention, but it’ll get done eventually!

50

Yes, fair enough - I know this won’t be the only thing crying for your attention.

Getting an AAX release out as soon as possible is an important thing to us though, so if you can give any more time to it that would be very much appreciated.

51

Plugin compile fine for me in Xcode, and it’s not loading by protools debug (as expected).

Salvator

52

Great news! Very happy to know this is in progress. 8)

53

Hi,

I am the programmer referred to in Paul’s earlier post. After a second look (with fresh eyes) I spotted that the implementation of the GetEffectDescriptions function in the AAX wrapper has an additional const that the extern declaration hasn’t got. Once this was fixed up our linker errors were gone and we had built a windows version of the aax plugin.

As expected, the plugin doesn’t load up in Pro Tools. Our next step was to add some logging in to the functions to find out exactly how far into loading/reading in the plug-in pro tools gets, which hasn’t produced any results at all.

Hopefully this information is of some use to you. As it stands I’m going to have to concentrate my efforts on another internal project for a short time, though if you keep us posted with any thoughts or progress you make yourself we’ll be happy to help out wherever we can as people become available.

Myk

54

Thanks Myk - I’m also a bit stumped about exactly why PT won’t load it, but will do some more digging soon…

55

Don’t know if this qualifies as progress of any sort, but PT (OSX) is actually seeing my AAX plugin. The scan fails with the message: [color=#0000FF]Pro Tools could not load the following plugins either because no valid authorization could be found, the iLok key was not connected or the plug-in was damaged[/color]. The iLok is present and valid, so the issue is still related to Juce wrap issues or possibly to certificate issues. This is using the release version of ProTools, BTW. We’re not there yet, but it’s something.

56

So did you digitally sign the binary, as necessary?

57

Working on that now. My Pace certificate had expired, so I have to do some updating.

58

I’ve got the code signing part fixed. The plugin shows as available inside ProTools. When I attempt to load it it doesn’t crash, but I don’t get a UI. Audio also stops passing in that path.

59

Big brother is watching…
this thread.

60

I am exited to see this get to work. Can someone make a small step by step manual for noobs??