greetings.

I am having a hellof a time finding what should be easy to determine; how decent is Pd as a vst(i) host using the [vst~] object?

I use Pd for gestural control stuff but i am now looking to route my midi wind controller into Pd and house all of my synths and effects there, but i cant find a whole lot of information on how truly viable this is. idont want to invest the next 3-6months ofmy life into thisproject onlyto find out that the objects arent stable in xp.

does anyone have any insight into this? my goal is to use multiple vst~ objects to create a softsynth rack,with effects that i can control in "real" realtime (ie, 2-5ms),with my wind controller and various sensors. if all works well, i want to slowly replace each vst with my own patches until the system is completely mine. is this realistic with pure data? can someone point me to any resources that might help me as i begin building my synth rack?

thank you in advance. this is some ofthe PD work i'vedone so far

cheers,

onyx

sorry if my question seems silly. but I didnt asksuch a question before i purchased and invested 6months into kore 2 and itwas the biggest mistake of last year.

no one?

onyx

Hey onyxashanti,
Im using [vst~] as core function of my patch (actually I'm using pd mostly as advanced controller of ohmboyz delay). Everything works fine the way described in help patch. I have only experienced some minor crashes when hard editing the patch and also some vst plugins does not show its gui window - but as you can still list and control its parameters you can work even without original vst gui.
ales

thank you for your reply.

i wonder about the stability as i scale up the usage. ie, plugins being routed into and out of other plugins and altering many parameters almost constantly for hours. I'm looking at about 8 synths and dynamics processing for each, although, i will more than likely use abstractions for much of those duties eventually.

but i am glad to see from lack of response to my question, and hear from you, that my concerns may be unfounded...hopefully.

The main issue with [vst~] is that it does not support every plugin. Apparently some plugins just seem to crash pd, while others don't display the gui (although this is not too much of a worry, since you can usually control all parameters from within pd), and then there are many that work. I've tried to load reaktor once and the gui showed up, but the plugin did not work. So before buying new plugins, it's best to try the demo and see if that works before purchasing it (if you're only intending to use them with pd of course).
I'm using a couple of reverbs, compressors and limitters without a problem.

Concerning the routing of audio between plugins, that's just plain pd connecting one instance of [vst~] to another, so no worries there.

If I'm not mistaken, there's one more issue: if you close a patch containing a [vst~] object with a plugin loaded and its gui is visible, I believe that crashed pd (but i'm not too sure about that).

Good luck,

D.

ah, thank you. i will test that tonight.

I will mostly be using avery specific set of plugins that arent easily emulated (by my miniscule knowledge of pd)like minimonsta and fm7.eventually, it will be all pd,but for now,i feel better knowing that this isnt one of those things that doesnt work and noone knows why. i will make sure not to have the gui open also.

cheers,

Onyx

If your plugins wouldn't work, you can of course host them in another host and route audio and signal (midi) streams between those applications via jack (jackaudio.org). But I havent' tried that myself sofar.

do you know where i can find instructions on using vst~? I've installed to external and have it open fine in pd but now i don't get what to do with it. I can't seem to make much sense from the object's helpfile either. I dont know where i need to place the desired plugins .dll file neither do i know what to do in order to select it in pd either.
Thanks