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.

Table of contents

• Current status
• Building
• Example plugins
• Example plugins
• Licensing

Plugins

Check each plugin's readme for more details on what the plugin actually does. There are currently no automated builds available, so check the building section for instructions on how to compile these plugins yourself.

• 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.

Framework

Current status

It actually works! There's still lots of small things to implement, but the core functionality and including basic GUI support are there. Currently the event loop has not yet been implemented for macOS, and the Windows version should work great but it has only been tested under Wine with yabridge.

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 --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

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

The example plugins in plugins/examples/ are also ISC-licensed, but the other plugins in the plugins/ directory may be licensed under the GPLv3 license. Check the plugin's Cargo.toml file for more information.