NIH-plug

This is a work in progress JUCE-lite-lite written in Rust to do some experiments with. The idea is to have a statefull but simple plugin API that gets rid of as much unnecessary ceremony wherever possible, while also keeping the amount of magic to minimum. Since this is not quite meant for general use just yet, the plugin API is limited to the functionality I needed and I'll expose more functionality as I need it. See the documentation comment in the Plugin trait for an incomplete list of missing functionality.

Current status

It actually mostly work! There's still lots of small things to implement, but the core functionality and including basic GUI support are there. That is, when using Linux. Currently the event loop has not yet been implemented for Windows and macOS.

Building

NIH-plug doesn't use any unstable features, and works with the latest stable Rust compiler.

After installing Rust you can compile any of the plugins in the plugins directory in the following way, replacing gain with the name of the plugin:

cargo xtask bundle gain --release --bundle-vst3

Example plugins

The best way to get an idea for what the API looks like is to look at the examples.

• gain is a simple smoothed gain plugin that shows off a couple other parts of the API, like support for storing arbitrary serializable state.
• gain-gui is the same plugin as gain, but with a GUI to control the parameter and a digital peak meter.
• sine is a simple test tone generator plugin with frequency smoothing that can also make use of MIDI input instead of generating a static signal based on the plugin's parameters.

Licensing

Right now everything is licensed under the GPLv3+ license, partly because the VST3 bindings used are also GPL licensed. I may split off the VST3 wrapper into its own crate and relicense the core library under a more permissive license later.