WHAT'S THERE ?

Opaz-PlugDK makes it easier/faster to create portable (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux) VST 2 plugins.

You can mix and match JRuby, Duby and Java to implement the plugins.

QUICK COURSE

• Blog post by Thibaut
• Screencast by Daniel309

AVAILABLE EXAMPLES

The examples are under the plugins folder:

• DubyGain, DubyFilta and DubyFreeComp are reflecting our current work trend, ie: mix JRuby (for declarative stuff) and Duby (for computation)
• HybridGain, HybridFilta and HybridSynth mix JRuby (for declarative stuff) and Java (for computation)
• RubyDelay, RubyFreeComp and RubyGain are pure JRuby version

DEPENDENCIES

Required:

• Java JDK (tested with version 1.6+) - the JRE is not sufficient
• JRuby (tested with version 1.6.7)

Optional:

• Mirah: jgem install mirah (or on Windows: jruby -S gem install mirah)
• JavaFX: install the JavaFX SDK 1.2.3

HOW TO BUILD A PLUGIN

See under plugins/ then use the available rake tasks to package one of them:

rake -f build.rakefile package plugin=DubyFreeComp

The package system will create ready-to-use VST for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux under the build subfolder of the plugin.

BUILD ORDER

Things are currently compiled in this order:

• src/* (Opaz stuff)
• your_plugin/*.duby
• your_plugin/*.java
• your_plugin/*.fx

PLUGINS STATUS

All the plugins compile and are able to be loaded in Ableton Live, except the Ruby based ones (temporary issue).

GUI SUPPORT

Basic GUI support is included. Example:

class MyEditor
	def initialize(frame)
		frame.setTitle("Hello from DefaultEditor!")
		frame.setSize(400, 300)
	end
end

class MyPlugin < OpazPlug
	plugin "MyPlugin", "Opaz", "LoGeek"
	# ...
	
	editor MyEditor
end

You'll be passed the main container frame so that you can add stuff in it.

LIVE DEBUGGING

Thanks to Daniel309, it's possible to enable live plugin patching through an IRB session.

Tweak tasks/tools.rb around line 90 to enable the IRB debugging editor:

PluginUIClass=IRBPluginGUI

LOGGING

It's often useful to log some informations while creating plugins. You can achieve this by calling "log" from the plugin:

class MyPlugin < OpazPlug
	def some_stuff
		log("message!")
	end
end

The logs end up inside some txt file in the plugin folder.

NOTES

The libs and templates folders are generated using rake prepare:templates and rake prepare:libs. Have a look at the rake file to see more about available tasks (compile, package, deploy).

AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

• Thibaut Barrère and Daniel309 (author of jVSTwRapper) for the whole thing
• Robert Pitts for his test clean-up patch
• Big thanks to Charles Oliver Nutter for his help on JRuby/Duby!
• Thanks as well to JFXtras for their implementation of SceneToJComponent.