nih-plug VS kakoune-lsp

Super cool. Any experience doing audio/synthesis/DSP work with this in a Flutter app? It would be particularly awesome if this enabled building VST plugins with Flutter and one of the Rust crates for VSTs (like NIH-plug or similar).

Looks nice! Rust really is a perfect fit for real-time audio software. At work we also use cpal for audio output, and has found some bugs as well. In my free time I'm tinkering with CLAP plugins for Bitwig, your app looks quite similar to Bitwig Grid which I like a lot. Maybe providing it as a plugin would be a future option.

I don't think Max4Live is not a good choice for building audio plugins. It's a weird platform that was designed for 'institutionalized academic music,' as I once read someone describe it. It's difficult to program in and not efficient. None of my favorite music software is made with it. It's also quite buggy, in my experience. For doing some basic extensions to Ableton Live specifically, beyond what VST allows access to, it's OK, since it's the only official way to do so.

If you want to just dive into DSP using wires and boxes, with some additional code sprinkled in, SynthEdit or Reaktor Core are faster, more fun, and produce better results. If you don't mind C++, check out iPlug from REAPER's WDL codebase: https://www.cockos.com/wdl/ — there are some forks of it.

There's also JUCE. You'll find some people complain about it and some people regret using it, despite it being relatively popular.

There are some Rust things for doing VST (and AU) development. Here's one that I've seen a few things made with: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/tree/master I wouldn't worry too much about the differences between C++ and Rust in this world. Audio software tends to be buggy, so the bar for being considered 'good enough' is pretty low.

There’s nih-plug for VST and CLAP plugins

As it's written in Rust, perhaps it could be implemented as a CLAP plugin. This is a nice framework I've been playing with https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/

The potential is both in terms of moving away from proprietary corporate-controlled standards (but also still providing shared wrappers to support those "legacy" :) audio plugin formats) and supporting Rust as a first class development language (via e.g. https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug).

Yep, Steinberg licensing sucks. I suggest you use nih-plug, it has a much nicer Rust API and supports generating both VST3 and CLAP plugins from your code. I'm only targetting CLAP nowadays, but unfortunately not many DAW's support it.

Your best bet is probably nih-plug.

Kakoune with LSP (gopls).

You could dive into installing kak-lsp, which will provide the code intelligence features you want. Kakoune doesn't do windowing on it's own, so your going to need to rely on something like tmux or a terminal emulator that does similar, such as wezterm, or even a tiling window manager (which is what is being used in the video). Kakoune really needs a lot of time invested to configure well though.

Why do you need vscode? Kakoune supports code actions, so this should work in the editor with the best editing model ever. See lsp-code-actions from https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp.

In addition, rather than using its own full-fledged programming language for plugins or choosing to use a specific programming language, it provides a limited configuration language that's closer to a domain-specific language and to be used as a "glue" between Kakoune and programs written in any language. For example, the kak-lsp plugin uses a program written in Rust that is integrated with Kakoune with a thin wrapper of Kakoune's configuration language.

If you're having problems with these capabilities, try to look at the kak-lsp debug output: https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp#troubleshooting

kak-lsp doesn't print to *debug* under normal operation. If you want to check on kak-lsp, enable verbose logging as described here and tail -f the log file.

So, since pretty much everything happens through a shell, you can use anything that produces an executable to write your logic. kak-lsp, for example, is written in Rust, with some kakscript to define the commands, hooks and options a user needs to interface with it.