Explain VSTs on Macs to me

[noisedude]

I'm new to Macs but I've bought an Intel Macbook with 10.5 and just wondering where that leaves me with all the VSTs I have on my desktop PC .... are they basically unusable or can they be used on a Mac? No rush to work it out because I'm waiting for a stable release of Reaper before I start using the Mac for any audio, and even then it'll still have a lot of good plugs bundled/ported with it.

Most of what I have are free VSTs but the Waves things and Vintage Warmer etc that I have - are they going to be PC only or what?

Cheers,
Nik

[stringycheesey]

Yup, PC only

[chris_llen123]

If you wanted to try Reaper on your Mac, you can use a program called Crossover made by Codeweavers software and you can run .exe files on mac without Windows. This means that you can install the PC version of Reaper and it works quite well, apart from the fact that the amplitude envelopes of any waveforms are not displayed. You can use all of your windows vst's (and any others you may have) and run them from your Mac.

The native mac version is coming on nicely though and that will naturally be the best option when it's ready.

[GIlJanus]

VST is a particular programming interface to do audio. You can get VSTs that will run on a PC running Windows or you can get VSTs that will run on a Mac running MacOSX. To make the Mac a little more complicated, there are Intel only binaries, PowerPC (PPC) only binaries, and nowadays you can get Universal Binary (UB) format binaries. To make the Mac even more complicated, Apple came up with Audio Units (AUs) - their own particular programming style of doing Audio.

I have lots of UB versions of VSTs that run under Reaper. I also have lots of UB versions of AUs.

At the moment, Reaper only supports VSTs on PCs and Macs. In the future, Justin has promised full support for AUs in the Mac version of Reaper.

When I run Live Lite 6 on my Mac, it can use both AUs and VSTs. I guess that Justin will allow Reaper to do like wise.

Hope that helps somewhat.

Gil

[ylinjohto]

Hi,
why I can´t get most of my plugins to work with osx reaper?
ambience and all that good shit. not working.

Is that something to do with leopard?
If I`ve got it right most of those vst plugs works with 10.4.
or am I totally lost here?

[mark604]

Hi,
why I can´t get most of my plugins to work with osx reaper?
ambience and all that good shit. not working.

Is that something to do with leopard?
If I`ve got it right most of those vst plugs works with 10.4.
or am I totally lost here?

First off, in reference to the initial poster, they need to be VST's for Mac OS X -- Windows and OS 9 plugins won't work.

Secondly, I'm using 10.4 and most VST's seem to have GUI problems with Reaper. You might want to try Camel Crusher. It's free, and for some unknown reason it's one of the ones that works.