NIH-plug

This is a work in progress JUCE-lite-lite written in Rust to do some experiments with, as well as a small collection of plugins. 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.

Come join us on the Rust Audio Discord.

Table of contents

• Plugins
• Framework
  • Current status
  • Building
  • Plugin formats
  • Example plugins
• Licensing

Plugins

Check each plugin's readme for more details on what the plugin actually does and for download links.

• Crisp adds a bright crispy top end to any low bass sound. Inspired by Polarity's Fake Distortion video.
• Diopser is a totally original phase rotation plugin. Useful for oomphing up kickdrums and basses, transforming synths into their evil phase-y cousin, and making everything sound like a cheap Sci-Fi laser beam.
• Puberty Simulator is that patent pending One Weird Plugin that simulates the male voice change during puberty! If it was not already obvious from that sentence, this plugin is a joke, but it might actually be useful (or at least interesting) in some situations. This plugin pitches the signal down an octave, but it also has the side effect of causing things to sound like a cracking voice or to make them sound slightly out of tune.

Framework

Current status

It actually works! There's still lots of small things to implement, but the core functionality and basic GUI support are there, with export targets and plugin bundling for both VST3 and CLAP. Currently the Windows support has only been tested under Wine with yabridge, and the macOS version hasn't been tested at all. Feel free to be the first one!

Building

NIH-plug 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

Plugin formats

NIH-plug can currently export VST3 and CLAP plugins. Exporting a specific plugin format for a plugin is as simple as calling the nih_export_<format>!(Foo); macro. The cargo xtask bundle commane will detect which plugin formats your plugin supports and create the appropriate bundles accordingly, even when cross compiling.

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.
• stft shows off some of NIH-plug's other optional higher level helper features, such as an adapter to process audio with a short-term Fourier transform using the overlap-add method, all using the compositional Buffer interfaces.

Licensing

The framework, its libraries, and the example plugins in plugins/examples/ are all licensed under the ISC license. However, the VST3 bindings used by nih_export_vst3!() are licensed under the GPLv3 license. This means that unless you replace these bindings with your own bindings made from scratch, any VST3 plugins built with NIH-plug need to be able to comply with the terms of the GPLv3 license.

The other plugins in the plugins/ directory may be licensed under the GPLv3 license. Check the plugin's Cargo.toml file for more information.