The new vst3 folder thingie

The Projucer
1

that sounds so unprofessional^^ please enlighten me on how that thing is called, when a vst3 is not a file but sort of a folder, cause apparently that is what the latest develop branch of the projucer lets visual studio output in an attempt to be more like on mac.

i’m personally more of a fan of pure files, but let’s not talk about that now. I’d just like to inform you that there can be confusion atm for people who update from an old branch to the latest develop, cause if they still have a plugin as a file in the vst3 folder and then the IDE trys to generate that folder thing it will not be able to copystep and also not give you a very usable error message. it would be cool if the build process was able to detect that there is a file it has to delete before it can create that vst3 folder.

2

I’m not an expert either, but sounds like the problem could be resolved in JUCE/JUCEUtils.cmake at develop · juce-framework/JUCE · GitHub by replacing the comment with an implementation:

if(dest)
    # Delete dest first, possibly inside _juce_copy_dir
    _juce_copy_dir("${target}" "${source}" "$<GENEX_EVAL:${dest}>")
else()
    message(WARNING "Target '${target}' requested copy but no destination is set")
endif()
3

They are called bundles, and they are mentioned by name right in the title of the latest commit to the dev branch:

Projucer: Build VST3 bundles from the MSVC exporters

Projucer-generated MSVC projects now build VST3s as bundles, rather than as
single DLL files.
2 Likes
4

N.B. here is the reference by Steinberg, who deprecated the single file format in 3.6.10

https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_dev_portal/pages/Technical+Documentation/Locations+Format/Plugin+Format.html#for-the-windows-platform

1 Like
5

ok good, now i know they are called ‘bundles’ and the reason for the change as well. now the only thing left is a statement from JUCE if they think it would be cool to add a patch for the projucer that automatically makes this transition nice for everyone… or not, i don’t care because i already have it working^^ i just think it would help because otherwise we’ll probably have a lot more people coming to the forum because of that soon

6

Since I just updated to JUCE 7.0.10 from JUCE 7.0.3, I’ve updated my Windows product installer to copy the bundle files into the correct location instead of the individual .vst file from before, and have confirmed that

C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\MyPlugin.vst3\Contents\x86_64-win\MyPlugin.vst3
as well as
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\MyPlugin.vst3\Contents\Resources\moduleinfo.json

are located correctly after running the installer.

Now Ableton 11(.3.21 - latest build of Ableton 11) cannot find my plugin (even after a deep rescan holding ‘alt’ key), whilst Bitwig (4.4.2) and FL Studio (21.0.3) was able to find the plugin without issue.

I am wondering if anybody else has confirmed this issue?

I’m concerned that a lot of customers may not be on new enough versions of their DAWs to properly pick up the plugin in a scan (or the DAWs are not updated to check the subfolder) and will get very confused when the plugin disappears after updating to my latest release… so I may well just modify my installer to only copy the .vst3 as before.