Waiting for the DAW to close in a separate process

Audio Plugins
1

For plugin updates, I am planning to implement a workflow of

  1. downloading the new installer in the background
  2. waiting for the DAW process to finish in separate process to launch installer (.pkg mac, innosetup win)
    The DAW needs to be closed on WIN to replace the dll

If anybody got that up and running themselves I would love to know more about the solution/caveats. If possible, I want to avoid creating a new executable that then also needs to be signed/shipped and just launch a process that runs a script.

Also happy to share my solution once I got it up and running.

2

I have never tried to start a process from a plugin.

Interestingly, however, it could work.

I could imagine that some tech-savvy users, like me, would not welcome the installation of any persistent background services to achieve this.

Apart from the fact that these would also need to use admin rights.

I could imagine that, given the increasingly strict security measures (such as sandboxing) in modern operating systems, this cannot be implemented in a future-proof manner.

1 Like
3

Running a process from a plugin works fine at least in non-sandboxed situations.

For example our Plugin/Host “Plugin Buddy” runs a plugin scanner which is a separate executable.

Having that said, send out a process from the plugin that somehow depends on the DAW closing sounds a bit complicated and error prone.

What some plugin installers do is try to detect if one of the famous DAWs, like Ableton Live, is running and suggest the user closes them before continuing, but they do it from within the installer itself - I believe that’s a feature that InnoSetup/pkgbuild/etc have.

1 Like