Synthagora

My previous  blog  about building Synthesizer VSTs on Windows used Visual Studio 2017 for all build tests. A couple of notable fails were the  mda-vst examples  and the blessed  SynthEdit SDK3  component build. The mda examples simply needed a compile flag addition: The SynthEdit SDK3 build needed to use the Visual Studio Installer to add further toolsets: I tried again to build  VST.NET  after the VS2017 update but sadly no improvement. I confirmed  JUCE  and  HISE  examples continue to build.

For a while I've created paraphonic synthesizer  VSTs  for my own use using  SynthEdit  and despite its age, it remains the most productive method I've discovered so far. Very complex systems can be integrated and tested quickly and then exported for use in your VST Host or DAW. As a graphical design system you stay 'connected' with routing and signal processing thoughout the design process and of course you can easily hear things as you go along. GUI panel design is pretty simple. As an intuitive design process there is little need to go hunting for examples and documentation though  this  is worth a read and its currently a free download. However the software developer in me wanted to review currently available code-centric approaches. There are a quite a few and I've wasted a lot of time on some of them. Despite the last comment there are a several notable exceptions such as  JUCE , the new  HISE ,  Pure Data (Pd)  and more frustratingly  VST.NET . I've