Tutorial on how to host VST plugins using JUCE?

Question

I would like to write some code to host VST plugins in my C++ application. It looks like the JUCE library may be helpful for this. Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial on how to host and connect together VST plugins in JUCE?

I've built the JUCE code and got the 'Plugin Host' sample working. It looks like the library will be able to do just what I want. My problem is that I'm finding the sample code hard to follow (not many comments etc). It also uses a lot of JUCE-specific coding for managing the UI and so on. I'm finding it hard to disentangle what I need to do to manage VST plugins from the other code in the sample.

If anyone knows of a tutorial I would be very grateful!

Answer 1

Most of the sample Juce code is indeed very Juce-specific, and if you're going to use that platform I'd encourage you to stick with it and push through the samples, even though they may not be very pretty.

It might be useful for you to know a bit more about VST hosting outside of Juce, though. Here's a tutorial on hosting VST's by hand in a C++ application.

Answer 2

This tutorial walks through the development of audio applications using JUCE, and in part 2 they cover hosting VST plugins.

(edit: I updated the links, also note they have a part 3 to the series)