nih-plug/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Since there is no stable release yet, the changes are organized per day in reverse chronological order. The main purpose of this document in its current state is to list breaking changes.

[Unreleased]

Breaking changes

• nih_plug_vizia has been updated to the latest Vizia version. Vizia's styling system has changed a lot since the last update, so plugin GUIs and stylesheets may require small changes before they behave the same again. A summary of the most important changes can be found in Vizia PR #291. Some notable breaking changes include:

  • Font handling and choosing between different variations of the same font (e.g. Noto Sans versus Noto Sans Light versus Noto Sans Light Italic) works very differently now.
  • ResizeHandle now needs to be the last element in a GUI because of changes to Vizia's event targetting mechanism.

• The raw_window_handle version used by NIH-plug has been updated to version 0.5.x.

Changed

• ParentWindowHandle has changed to be a sum type of different parent window handle types, similar to RawWindowHandle. This makes it easier to use GUI libraries that link against a different version of raw_window_handle than the one used by NIH-plug itself by simply wrapping around ParentWindowHandle.
• nih_debug_assert*!() failures are now promoted to a warning instead of a debug message. This makes the non-fatal debug assertion failures easier to spot.

[2023-12-30]

Added

• Added initial RISC-V support to nih_plug_xtask. (#95).

[2023-12-06]

Fixed

• nih_export_vst3!() no longer requires nih_debug_assert to be in scope.

[2023-11-05]

Changed

• FloatParam and IntParam ranges can now be accessed using methods on the parameters (#89).

[2023-09-21]

Fixed

• Fixed null pointers assertions in the low level buffer management code not working correctly.

[2023-09-03]

Added

• nih_export_vst3!() now also supports more than one plugin type argument, just like nih_export_clap!().

Fixed

• The nih_export_*!() macros now use $crate to refer to NIH-plug itself, which makes it possible to use the NIH-plug crate under a different name.

[2023-08-05]

Breaking changes

• The minimum supported Rust version has been bumped to 1.70 so we can start using OnceCell and OnceLock to phase out uses of lazy_static.

Added

• nih_export_clap!() can now take more than one plugin type argument to allow exporting more than one plugin from a single plugin library.

[2023-05-13]

Fixed

• Removed the Default bound from the SysExMessage::Buffer type. This was a leftover from an older design.

[2023-04-30]

Changed

• Added debug assertions to make sure parameter ranges are valid. The minimum value must always be lower than the maximum value and they cannot be equal.

[2023-04-27]

Changed

• The v2s_f32_rounded() formatter now avoids returning negative zero values for roundtripping reasons since -0.0 and 0.0 correspond to the same normalized value.

[2023-04-24]

Breaking changes

• Plugin::editor() and Plugin::task_executor() now take &mut self instead of &self to make it easier to move data into these functions without involving interior mutability.

Changed

• The Plugin trait's documentation has been updated to better clarify the structure and to more explicitly mention that the non-lifecycle methods are called once immediately after creating the plugin object.

Fixed

• The logger now uses the correct local time offset on Linux instead of defaulting to UTC due to some implementation details of the underlying time crate.
• The buffer changes from March 31st broke the sample accurate automation feature. This has now been fixed.

[2023-04-22]

Added

• CLAP plugins can optionally declare pages of remote controls so DAWs can more automatically map pages of the plugin's parameters to hardware controllers. This is currently a draft extension, so until the extension is finalized host support may break at any moment.

Changed

• The CLAP version has been updated to 1.1.8.
• The prelude module now also re-exports the following:
  • The PluginApi num.
  • The Transport struct.

Fixed

• The upgrade to CLAP 1.1.8 caused NIH-plug to switch from the draft version of the voice info extension to the final version, fixing voice stacking with recent versions of Bitwig.

[2023-04-05]

Breaking changes

• The nih_debug_assert*!() macros are now upgraded to regular panicking debug_assert!() macros during tests.
• SmoothingStyle::for_oversampling_factor() has been removed in favor of a new mechanism that allows the smmoothers to be aware of oversampling. A new Smoothingstyle::OversamplingAware(oversampling_times, style) can be used to wrap another Smoothingstyle to make it aware of an oversampling amount that can change at runtime. The oversampling_times is an Arc<AtomicF32> that indicates the current oversampling amount. This makes it possible to link multiple parameters to the same oversampling amount, have different sets of parameters run at different effective sample rates, and automatically update those oversampling amounts/sample rate multipliers from a parameter callback.
• As a consequence of the above change, Smoothingstyle is no longer Copy since the OversamplingAware smoothing style contain an Arc<Smoothingstyle>. It can still be Cloned.

Changed

• The prelude module now also re-exports the AtomicF32 type since it's needed to use the new Smoothingstyle::OversamplingAware.

[2023-04-01]

Fixed

• Auxiliary output buffers are now always zeroed out in case the host didn't do this for us. This was a regression from before 2023-03-31.

[2023-03-31]

Changed

• Buffer management has been completely rewritten so it can be shared among all of NIH-plug's backends. This should not result in any noticeable changes, but it should reduce the chances of backend-specific bugs when it comes to interacting with audio buffers and it will make it simpler to implement buffer management for new plugin APIs.

Fixed

• When a main IO audio buffers has more output channels than input channels, the excess output channels are now correctly filled with zeroes instead of containing whatever data was left in the host's output buffers. As part of this change NIH-plug's buffer management has been refactored to reuse the same logic in all of its wrappers.
• Any outstanding VST3 output events are now sent to the host during a parameter flush.

[2023-03-21]

Changed

• The logger now always shows the module in debug builds to make it easier to know where logging messages are sent from. Previously this was only done for the debug and trace message levels.
• The logger now filters out the Mapped XXXX font faces in YYYms. messages from cosmic text in release builds as this is unnecessary noise for end users.
• nih_plug_vizia: ParamButton's active color was made much lighter to make the text more readable, and the hover state has been fixed.

[2023-03-18]

Added

• nih_plug_vizia: Added a GuiContextEvent::Resize event. The plugin can emit this to trigger a resize to its current size, as specified by its ViziaState's size callback. This can be used to declaratively resize a plugin GUI and it removes some potential surface for making mistakes in the process. See GuiContextEvent::Resize's documentation for an example.

[2023-03-17]

Added

• Added a NoteEvent::channel() method to get an event's channel, if it has any. (#62)

[2023-03-07]

This document is now also used to keep track of non-breaking changes.

Breaking changes

• The way window sizes work in ViziaState has been reworked to be more predictable and reliable. Instead of creating a ViziaState with a predefined size and then tracking the window's current size in that object, ViziaState now takes a callback that returns the window's current logical size. This can be used to compute the window's current size based on the plugin's state. The result is that window sizes always match the plugin's current state and recalling an old incorrect size is no longer possible.

Added

• Debug builds now include debug assertions that detect incorrect use of the GuiContext's parameter setting methods.

[2023-02-28]

Breaking changes

• ViziaState::from_size() now takes a third boolean argument to control whether the window's size is persisted or not. This avoids a potential bug where an old window size is recalled after the plugin's GUI's size has changed in an update to the plugin.

[2023-02-20]

Breaking changes

• The way audio IO layouts are configured has changed completely to align better with NIH-plug's current and future supported plugin API backends. Rather than defining a default layout and allowing the host/backend to change the channel counts by polling the Plugin::accepts_bus_config() function, the plugin now explicitly enumerates all supported audio IO layouts in a declarative fashion. This change gives the plugin more options for defining alternative audio port layouts including layouts with variable numbers of channels and ports, while simultaneously removing ambiguities and behavior that was previously governed by heuristics.

  All types surrounding bus layouts and port names have changed slightly to accommodate this change. Take a look at the updated examples for more details on how this works. The Plugin::AUDIO_IO_LAYOUTS field's documentation also contains an example for how to initialize the layouts slice.

• As a result of the above change, NIH-plug's standalones no longer have --input and --output command line arguments to change the number of input and output channels. Instead, they now have an --audio-layout option that lets the user select an audio layout from the list of available layouts by index. --audio-layout=help can be used to list those layouts.

[2023-02-01]

Breaking changes

• The Vst3Plugin::VST3_CATEGORIES string constant has been replaced by a Vst3Plugin::VST3_SUBCATEGORIES constant of type &[Vst3SubCategory]. Vst3SubCategory is an enum containing all of VST3's predefined categories, and it behaves similarly to the ClapFeature enum used for CLAP plugins. This makes defining subcategories for VST3 plugins easier and less error prone.

[2023-01-31]

Breaking changes

• NIH-plug has gained support MIDI SysEx in a simple, type-safe, and realtime-safe way. This sadly does mean that every Plugin instance now needs to define a SysExMessage type definition and constructor function as Rust does not yet support defaults for associated types (Rust issue #29661):

  type SysExMessage = ();
  

• As the result of the above change, NoteEvent is now parameterized by a SysExMessage type. There is a new PluginNoteEvent<P> type synonym that can be parameterized by a Plugin to make using this slightly less verbose.

[2023-01-12]

Breaking changes

• The Vizia dependency has been updated. This updated version uses a new text rendering engine, so there are a couple breaking changes:
  • The names for some of Vizia's fonts have changed. The constants and font registration functions in nih_plug_vizia::assets and nih_plug_vizia::vizia_assets still have the same name, but all uses of the font CSS property and .font() view modifier will have to be changed.
  • Metrics for rendered text have change slightly. Most notably the height and vertical positioning of text is slightly different, so you may have to adjust your layout slightly accordingly.

[2023-01-11]

Breaking changes

• Editor::param_values_changes() is no longer called from the audio thread and thus no longer needs to be realtime safe.
• A new Editor::param_value_changed(id, normalized_value) method has been added. This is used to notify the plugin of changes to individual parameters.
• A similar new Editor::param_modulation_changed(id, modulation_offset) is used to inform the plugin of a parameter's new monophonic modulation offset.

[2023-01-06]

Breaking changes

• The threads used for the .schedule_gui() and .schedule_background() methods are now shared between all instances of a plugin. This makes .schedule_gui() on Linux behave more like it does on Windows and macOS, and there is now only a single background thread instead of each instance spawning their own thread.

[2023-01-05]

Breaking changes

• Buffer::len() has been renamed to Buffer::samples() to make this less ambiguous.
• Block::len() has been renamed to Block::samples().

[2022-11-17]

Breaking changes

• The Params derive macro now also properly supports persistent fields in #[nested] parameter structs. This takes #[nested(id_prefix = "...")] and #[nested(array)] into account to allow multiple copies of a persistent field. This may break existing usages as serialized field data without a matching preffix or suffix is no longer passed to the child object.

[2022-11-17]

Breaking changes

• The order of #[nested] parameters in the parameter list now always follows the declaration order instead of nested parameters being ordered below regular parameters.

[2022-11-08]

Breaking changes

• The Param::{next_previous}{_step,_normalized_step}() functions now take an additional boolean argument to indicate that the range must be finer. This is used for floating point parameters to chop the range up into smaller segments when using Shift+scroll.

[2022-11-07]

Breaking changes

• Param::plain_value() and Param::normalized_value() have been renamed to Param::modulated_plain_value() and Param::modulated_normalized_value(). These functions are only used when creating GUIs, so this shouldn't break any other plugin code. This change was made to make it extra clear that these values do include monophonic modulation, as it's very easy to mistakenly use the wrong value when handling user input in GUI widgets.

[2022-11-06]

Breaking changes

• nih_plug_vizia::create_vizia_editor_without_theme() has been removed, and nih_plug_vizia::create_vizia_editor() has gained a new argument to specify what amount of theming to apply. This can now also be used to completely disable all theming include Vizia's built-in theme.
• nih_plug_vizia::create_vizia_editor() no longer registers any fonts by default. Even when those fonts are not used, they will still be embedded in the binary, increasing its size by several megabytes. Instead, you can now register individual fonts by calling the nih_plug_vizia::assets::register_*() functions. This means that you must call nih_plug_vizia::assets::register_noto_sans_light() for the default theming to work. All of the plugins in this repo also use nih_plug_vizia::assets::register_noto_sans_thin() as a title font.
• Additionally, the Vizia fork has been updated to not register any default fonts for the same reason. If you previously relied on Vizia's default Roboto font, then you must now call nih_plug_vizia::vizia_assets::register_roboto() at the start of your process function.

[2022-10-23]

Breaking changes

• nih_plug_vizia has been updated. Widgets with custom drawing code will need to be updated because of changes in Vizia itself.

[2022-10-22]

Breaking changes

• The Editor trait and the ParentWindowHandle struct have been moved from nih_plug::plugin to a new nih_plug::editor module. If you only use the prelude module then you won't need to change anything.

• The nih_plug::context module has been split up into nih_plug::context::init, nih_plug::context::process, and nih_plug::context::gui to make it clearer which structs go with which context. You again don't have to change anything if you use the prelude.

• NIH-plug has gained support for asynchronously running background tasks in a simple, type-safe, and realtime-safe way. This sadly does mean that every Plugin instance now needs to define a BackgroundTask type definition and constructor function as Rust does not yet support defaults for associated types (Rust issue #29661):

  type BackgroundTask = ();
  

• The &mut impl InitContext argument to Plugin::initialize() needs to be changed to &mut impl InitContext<Self>.

• The &mut impl ProcessContext argument to Plugin::process() needs to be changed to &mut impl ProcessContext<Self>.

• The Plugin::editor() method now also takes a _async_executor: AsyncExecutor<Self> parameter.

[2022-10-20]

Breaking changes

• Some items have been moved out of nih_plug::param::internals. The main Params trait is now located under nih_plug::param, and the PersistentTrait trait, implementations, and helper functions are now part of a new nih_plug::param::persist module. Code importing the Params trait through the prelude module doesn't need to be changed.
• The nih_plug::param module has been renamed to nih_plug::params. Code that only uses the prelude module doesn't need to be changed.
• The create_egui_editor() function from nih_plug_egui now also takes a build closure to apply initialization logic to the egui context.
• Editor and the editor handle returned by Editor::spawn now only require Send and no longer need Sync. This is not a breaking change, but it might be worth being aware of.
• Similar to the above change, Plugin also no longer requires Sync.

[2022-10-13]

Breaking changes

• The #[nested] parameter attribute has gained super powers and has its syntax changed. It can now automatically handle many situations that previously required custom Params implementations to have multiple almost identical copies of a parameter struct. The current version supports both fields with unique parameter ID prefixes, and arrays of parameter objects. See the Params trait for more information on the new syntax.

[2022-09-22]

Breaking changes

• nih_plug_vizia has been updated. Custom widgets will need to be updated because of changes Vizia itself.
• nih_plug_egui has been updated from egui 0.17 to egui 0.19.

[2022-09-06]

Breaking changes

• Parameter values are now accessed using param.value() instead of param.value, with param.value() being an alias for the existing param.plain_value() function. The old approach, while perfectly safe in practice, was technically unsound because it used mutable pointers to parameters that may also be simultaneously read from in an editor GUI. With this change the parameters now use actual relaxed atomic stores and loads to avoid mutable aliasing, which means the value fields are now no longer directly accessible.

[2022-09-04]

Breaking changes

• Smoother::next_block_mapped() and Smoother::next_block_exact_mapped() have been redesigned. They now take an index of the element being generated and the float representation of the smoothed value. This makes it easier to use them for modulation, and it makes it possible to smoothly modulate integers and other stepped parameters. Additionally, the mapping functions are now also called for every produced value, even if the smoother has already finished smoothing and is always producing the same value.

[2022-08-19]

Breaking changes

• Standalones now use the plugin's default input and output channel counts instead of always defaulting to two inputs and two outputs.
• Plugin::DEFAULT_NUM_INPUTS and Plugin::DEFAULT_NUM_OUTPUTS have been renamed to Plugin::DEFAULT_INPUT_CHANNELS and Plugin::DEFAULT_OUTPUT_CHANNELS respectively to avoid confusion as these constants only affect the main input and output.

[2022-07-18]

Breaking changes

• IntRange and FloatRange no longer have min/max methods and instead have next/previous step methods. This is for better compatibility with the new reversed ranges.

[2022-07-06]

Breaking changes

• There are new NoteEvent::PolyModulation and NoteEvent::MonoAutomation events as part of polyphonic modulation support for CLAP plugins.
• The block smoothing API has been reworked. Instead of Smoothers having their own built-in block buffer, you now need to provide your own mutable slice for the smoother to fill. This makes the API easier to understand, more flexible, and it allows cloning smoothers without worrying about allocations.In addition, the new implementation is much more efficient when the smoothing period has ended before or during the block.

[2022-07-05]

Breaking changes

• The ClapPlugin::CLAP_HARD_REALTIME constant was moved to the general Plugin trait as Plugin::HARD_REALTIME_ONLY, and best-effort support for VST3 has been added.

[2022-07-04]

Breaking changes

• The CLAP_DESCRIPTION, CLAP_MANUAL_URL, and CLAP_SUPPORT_URL associated constants from the ClapPlugin are now optional and have the type Option<&'static str> instead of &'static str.
• Most NoteEvent variants now have an additional voice_id field.
• There is a new NoteEvent::VoiceTerminated event a plugin can send to let the host know a voice has been terminated. This needs to be output by CLAP plugins that support polyphonic modulation.
• There is a new NoteEvent::Choke event the host can send to a plugin to let it know that it should immediately terminate all sound associated with a voice or a key.

[2022-07-02]

Breaking changes

• The Params::serialize_fields() and Params::deserialize_fields() methods and the State struct now use BTreeMaps instead of HashMaps so the order is consistent the plugin's state to JSON multiple times. These things are part of NIH-plug's internals, so unless you're implementing the Params trait by hand you will not notice any changes.

[2022-06-01]

Breaking changes

• The ClapPlugin::CLAP_FEATURES field now uses an array of ClapFeature values instead of &'static strs. CLAP 0.26 contains many new predefined features, and the existing ones now use dashes instead of underscores. Custom features are still possible using ClapFeature::Custom.

[2022-05-27]

Breaking changes

• Plugin::process() now takes a new aux: &mut AuxiliaryBuffers parameter. This was needed to allow auxiliary (sidechain) inputs and outputs.
• The Plugin::initialize() method now takes a &mut impl InitContext instead of a &mut impl ProcessContext.

[2022-05-22]

Breaking changes

• The current processing mode is now stored in BufferConfig. Previously this could be fetched through a function on the ProcessContext, but this makes more sense as it remains constant until a plugin is deactivated. The BufferConfig now contains a field for the minimum buffer size that may or may not be set depending on the plugin API.
• Previously calling param.non_automatable() when constructing a parameter also made the parameter hidden. Hiding a parameter is now done through param.hide(), while param.non_automatable() simply makes it so that the parameter can only be changed manually and not through automation or modulation.

...

Who knows what happened at this point!