noob asks: WDL for vst UI?

[bruce]

Hi everyone:

I've never written a UI for a VST plug-in. I'm looking for something that will let me make an OK looking GUI without a ton of effort.

I don't want to get married to a "framework" that deals with non-GUI things, but I don't want to roll my own GUI controls either.

I think Juce and IPlug are more than I want - I want to deal with all the plug-in audio/parameter code myself.

So - my question. Is WDL an appropriate technology to use for this? If so, are there any down-loadable examples of vst plug-ins (with source code) that use WDL for their GUI?

Lastly, will WDL take care of window creation and event management so that I don't have to write native GUI code? Or is WDL just a lower level gfx library?

Thanks!

[Xenakios]

Lastly, will WDL take care of window creation and event management so that I don't have to write native GUI code? Or is WDL just a lower level gfx library?

Thanks!

WDL is a general purpose library of different kinds of things. The GUI spesific stuff seems very hard to use and isn't documented at all. I doubt it will help you to avoid platform spesific code to any large extent. For example if you look at the source code of the WDL JetPack game example, it uses the usual Windows win32 API calls and window procedures for handling windows and events and all that.

[schwa]

IPlug is a high level wrapper for LICE (the WDL graphics library) plus a bunch of window and event management stuff. IPlug is probably higher level than you want (almost everything gets abstracted away), using LICE directly may be lower level than you want, but by looking through the innards of both you may be able to roll your own version of what you want.

There are a number of other well respected higher level frameworks, but there is sort of a gap between bare-metal tools like WDL/LICE and "all your implementation are belong to us" frameworks like Qt.

[Xenakios]

There are a number of other well respected higher level frameworks, but there is sort of a gap between bare-metal tools like WDL/LICE and "all your implementation are belong to us" frameworks like Qt.

Qt actually isn't that bad with regards to the "close to the bare metal thing", one is free to use whatever low level constructs seem necessary, including calling win32 APIs directly (native window handles are provided for Qt widgets on demand and so on) or handling Windows message pump messages. Qt does have other problems though which make it very unnattractive to use for any kinds of plugins though. (Excluding Qt's own plugin system, but obviously no audio app for example uses that for it's audio plugins.)

[bruce]

thanks everyone - that give me a much better idea of what these libraries are for.

I may very well take a look at some of these and steal some pieces...

bruce

[bvesco]

I use IPlug and associated WDL stuff for my plugins and have not had to get into platform specific stuff yet. Doing the Mac versions did not require any additional GUI coding other than what I already did for the Win versions. I didn't get into doing any wacky stuff like native file dialogs, I'm only using the "normal" plugin gui widgets like knobs, switches, meters, etc.

[bruce]

Wow! Nice UI on your plugins!

I'll see when I get into the guts, but I guess I think I'll have to do some native stuff if I have to create my own top level window and handle events.

If the IPlug stuff does the window management, and I don't elect to use IPlug (just WDL), then I'll have to do that myself.

But obviously I need to look more closely at WDL and IPlug to find out what they are all about.