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VST 3 - AudioUnit v2 Wrapper

On this page:

• Introduction
• How does it work?

Related pages:

• Audio Unit v3 Plug-Ins | Apple Developer Documentation

Helper Class wrapping a VST 3 plug-in to an Audio Unit v2 plug-in

Introduction

The VST 3 SDK comes with an AudioUnit wrapper, which can wrap one VST 3 audio processor and edit controller as an AudioUnit effect/instrument.

The wrapper is a small dynamic library which loads the VST 3 plug-in. As AudioUnits store some important information in their resource fork, this library must be compiled for every VST 3 plug-in.

How does it work?

• You first need to build the SDK (check here) and then you should - have the xcode project.
• You may need to download the CoreAudio SDK from Apple and point cmake to it when building the SDK with it (see here).
• create a copy of the again AU wrapper example project directory (public.sdk/source/vst/auwrapper/again/)
• rename the copy to your needs
• edit the target settings of the project and change
  • Product Name
  • Library search path so that it points to the directory where libauwrapper.a exists
  • architecture setting so that it only includes architectures that the VST 3 plug-in supports
• search in the project for AUWRAPPER_CHANGE and change the settings to your needs, especially in:
  • edit audiounitconfig.h, see comments there
  • edit Info.plist, see comments there
• edit the "Make Links Script" for easier debugging/development
• build your project
• done ... that is all!

For the release version, you must place a copy or an alias of your VST 3 plug-in in the resource folder of the bundle named "plugin.vst3"