Airwindows – Free VST Plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Airwindows – Free VST Plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux

airwindows.com

55 pointsdijksterhuis42 comments

Is there a list of all the plugins including a short description? I found this: http://www.airwindows.com/category/vst/ but it only has a few per page and there seem to be hundreds.

Edit: here's a list of all the plugin names in alphabetical order, at least:

https://github.com/airwindows/airwindows/tree/master/plugins...

The `what.txt` file in the zip files (links on left hand side) includes a list of all included plugins and what they do.

This can help navigating all Airwindows stuff

https://airwindowscheatsheet.aboni.dev

I really like Airwindows plugins, the hard part is digging through all of them to find the plugins which suit your workflow. Chris also does livestreams on its YouTube channel and he recently started doing some coding streams while he writes new plugins.

The linked page http://www.airwindows.com/vsts/ doesn't list Linux as one of the systems these VSTs support, but if you use Linux (like I do) there is another page that says that Linux is supported, since 2018.

Aye, I did find it weird that Chris mostly mentions Windows/Mac and not Linux. What was the page you found?

The TFA page contains a search dialog, and punching in 'linux' there takes you to:

http://www.airwindows.com/airwindows-linux/

VSTs are (mostly) system agnostic. It's likely that it was Linux software lacking VST support at the time of writing.

Nowadays DAVs support running Windows VSTs as part of their functionality (e.g. Ardour) or you can connect VSTs running under Wine hosts using Jack Audio Connection Kit to any DAV that doesn't

Correction: I meant DAWs; of course.

This might be a bit tangential, but does anyone know a way to host a VST plugin in a container you can send midi notes to programmatically?

I didn't even know I wanted this answer, but now I do...

I wonder if just opening the VST in FL Studio and sending using mido would do it? (https://github.com/mido/mido)

"Container" is a very overloaded term in this context.

Plugins run inside "host" applications. I do not know of any way to do this inside a browser. Running it inside a Docker-like container seems to have more or less zero purpose from my perspective.

If i were running windows I'd be extremely suspicious of free VSTs as they are basically executables; running them in a virtualized environment would give me peace of mind.

Bitwig might do something like that i.e. Ableton crashes if a VST goes, Bitwig doesn't

Bitwig runs plugins in a separate process. That process has full access to the same environment as Bitwig (filesystem, network, machine state, etc. etc.)

Then you'd choose to run the DAW/host in a virtualized environment too.

This might not be the answer you are looking for, but this is one of the things you use a DAW for. If you have a project where you need to use a programming language to live generate midi, I would recommend taking a look at puredata for generating that MIDI, and a plugin host from this list[1]. You could probably use one of the programming libraries in that list for jack to write a program that uses the jack midi api directly.

1: https://jackaudio.org/applications/

There's absolutely no reason to use JACK to write such a thing. Native audio/MIDI APIs on every platform are a better fit in almost every way.

ps. I wrote JACK (with a lot of excellent help)

Oh, damn!

Oh okay, thank you for the correction.

ps. I love JACK and Ardour, you are awesome!

Delighted if they've been useful to you.

You could use Renoise. It has a lua api [1]. There are some examples of using midi specifically [2].

[1] https://files.renoise.com/xrnx/documentation/Renoise.Song.AP...

[2] http://neurogami.com/blog/neurogami-using-lua-to-process-mid...

On iOS you could do this with AUM, Mozaic, and your audio unit synthesizer of choice.

Surprised nobody told you to just get the SDK from Steinberg. It's C++ and super easy to integrate with (I was making a DAW a while back). You can send it midi notes in a strict, basically. SDK is free.

After reviewing the many options posted (thanks everyone!), I think this is probably the right answer. A barebones CLI program that can accept commands over TCP. It looks like it would be fairly short.

Why TCP?

CLI vst hosts already exist on Linux (at least).

Could you give me an example of one? I've seen a couple but they seemed to be for batch processing, not for live use.

Gah. Now that you've put me on the spot for my stupid remark, I confess that I can't think of any VST CLI hosts (there are ones for LV2, but's that a different plugin API). I'll ask around and see if I can turn anything up.

So here's one: https://github.com/teragonaudio/MrsWatson

Ah, that's one of the batch ones - I'm looking load (ideally several) VSTs and send them MIDI events in real time, so I'm writing code to play virtual MIDI keyboards.

A workflow that looks a lot like Overtone (which is a Clojure library for connecting to SuperCollider over a REPL), or Sonic Pi (same idea and creator but with Ruby).

I realize in hindsight it wasn't terribly clear what I was asking for, in part because I'm not really familiar with the options available in the space and the correct terminology (as you pointed out).

Steinberg discontinued and took down the VST2 SDK, but many if not most existing VST plugins are VST2 only (and many are too old to ever see an upgrade). The VST3 SDK is definitely not easy to work with and not backwards compatible with the VST2 SDK.

Wow really? Been a minute since I've looked last. I'm surprised they did that, VST3 isn't as ubiquitous as I think they'd like it to be. But since when has that stopped Steinberg from making a poor design decision lol

I'm sure you can find a copy of the vst2 sdk somewhere on GitHub if you can look hard enough for it.

It's really infuriating because it effectively means that new DAWs or other other apps can't host VST2 plugins unless the developer happens to have a license and a copy of the SDK (Steinberg doesn't issue any VST2 licenses anymore!). Considering how many VST2 plugins there are which will never see an upgrade, this is really an unfair disadvantage. Of course, Cubase will be the last one to drop VST2 support...

Some people have rewritten/reverse-engineered the VST2 headers. Steinberg claims this is illegal, but I'm not sure this would hold up in court.

Finally, the whole VST2 debacle is a great example of why people shouldn't put all their trust in a single company and why industry standards need to be open!

> I'm sure you can find a copy of the vst2 sdk somewhere on GitHub if you can look hard enough for it.

A simple Google search will do :-)

REAPER has support for multiple programming languages including python, I bet you could program MIDI output to a VST in it.

Or maybe max/MSP ?

Check out bipscript. You can use carla to host vst as lv2 plugin. http://www.bipscript.org/

You can host VST plugins in Pd and Supercollider with the following extension: https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin. Possibilities are almost unlimited.

Or just use Pd or Supercollider to generate the MIDI and send it to your DAW via loopback (e.g. LoopMidi on Windows)

Airwindows' stuff is awesome, and open source too! Would highly recommend checking out some of the DSP on his github

The GitHub page for those who found it hard to find:

https://github.com/airwindows

I thought it was such a no-gui thing that the link to it was invisible

The source code is a bit bizarre, all the code is repeated for each plugin format, and also full of unrolled loops and inline magic numbers. It makes me wonder if it is actually the result of some compile-to-C++ setup, in which case it's not actually the true source code. If not, it looks like a maintenance hell.

There are coding streams on the YouTube and it seems to be all C++.

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