In a course, I asked the students to try vstplugin~, which turned out to be a little fiddly until we figured out the right options to use. (That's not a criticism -- it's a complex external and it took a little while to figure out the most streamlined approach. Cheers to @spacechild1 for making [vstplugin~] pretty much bulletproof.)

Having figured that out, I thought I would make it easier for the students by making a wrapper, to:

  • load a plug-in automatically with -e (currently this is not configurable, which is a potentially controversial choice, but my purpose is to simplify the process for the students, and they will universally prefer to see the familiar VST GUI);
  • show the GUI automatically (optionally) after loading;
  • provide a couple of conveniences (show/hide GUI, program_list, MIDI panic).

I didn't do much to clean up the layout inside the abstraction, but it seems helpful, so I thought I would share.

This assumes vstplugin~/ is a directory immediately beneath one of your search paths ([declare -path vstplugin~] inside).

hjh

vstplug-hjh~.zip