Virtual Studio Technology

For the television term, see Virtual studio.

Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology and its acronym VST refer to an interface standard for connecting audio synthesizer and effect plugins to audio editors and hard-disk recording systems and also giving the plugins a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for easy manipulation. VST and similar technologies allow the replacement of traditional recording studio hardware with software counterparts. Thousands of plugins exist, making VST the most widespread audio plugin architecture. The technology can be licensed from its creator, Steinberg.

Overview

VST provides a visual interface, allowing users to use the mouse to turn virtual dials and switches, similar to the physical switches and knobs on audio hardware. Some software allows users to enter exact values for parameters using the keyboard. MIDI controllers can also be used to control the software.

Some VST instruments (VSTi) are software emulations of well-known hardware synthesizer devices and sampler devices, emulating the look and feel of the original equipment in addition to its sonic characteristics. This enables VSTi users to work with virtual versions of gear that may be difficult to obtain in its original form. There's also a wide range of new VST plugins, which don't have the purpose of emulating vintage gear. VST plugins which emulate vintage gear are only a subset of all VST plugins on the market.

All VST software can run inside a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW, basically a computer with a professional sound card). VST software provides this host with additional functionality. Some hosts, but not all, can record the movements of dials and switches by the user.

VST plug-ins

With appropriate hardware and drivers, such as a sound card that supports ASIO, VST plug-ins can be used in real-time. ASIO bypasses Windows' slower audio engine, offering much lower latency. There are 3 types of VST plug-ins:

VST instruments

A VST plug-in that generates audio. They are generally either virtual synthesizers or samplers. One of the first VST instruments was the Neon VSTi (see SCREENSHOT), which was included in Steinberg's Cubase.

VST effects

A VST plug-in that is used to process an audio input, such as reverb and phaser effects. Other monitoring effects provide visual feedback of the input signal without processing the audio. Most hosts allow multiple effects to be chained.

VST MIDI effects

A VST plug-in that is used to process MIDI messages prior to routing the MIDI data to other VST instruments or hardware devices, for example, to transpose or create arpeggios.

VST hosts

Software

A VST host is a software application or hardware device that allows VST plug-ins to be used in a logical context, interacting with digital audio and MIDI elements. There are a wide range of VST-compatible hosts available, some of the most popular include REAPER, Cubase, Ableton Live, Sonar and FL Studio.

Others include [Wavosaur (FREE)] and Sony's [Sound Forge].

VST plug-ins can be hosted in incompatible environments through the use of a translation layer, or shim. For example, FXpansion offers a VST to RTAS (Real Time AudioSuite) wrapper, which allows VST plug-ins to be used in the popular Pro Tools Digital Audio Workstation, and a VST to Audio Units wrapper, which allows VST plug-ins to be used in Apple Logic Pro Digital Audio Workstation.

Hardware

Some hardware hosts (e.g. [Muse] Receptor) can load special versions of VST plug-ins. These units are portable and usable without a computer, although all editing is done on a computer.

Other hardware options include PCI/PCIe cards designed for audio processing, which take over audio processing from the computer's CPU and free up RAM.

Software also exists allowing audio data to be transported between computers over a network, allowing the main host to run on one computer and VST plug-ins to run on peripheral computers.

VST plug-in standard

The VST plug-in standard is the audio plugin standard created by Steinberg to allow any third party developers to create VST plug-ins for use within VST host applications. VST requires separate installations for Windows/Mac/Linux. The majority of VST plug-ins are available for Windows.

Competing technologies

* Steinberg decided to drop support for DirectX from Cubase 4.

GNU/Linux support

See also: Free audio software

Kjetil Matheussen's vstserver first provided a mechanism for loading and using VST plug-ins via his k_vst~ object for the Pure Data synthesis environment and his ladspavst "plugin to host plugins" for the LADSPA Linux audio plug-in API. Kjetil has added his vsti to his list of vstserver clients, providing a way to use VSTi plugin instruments under Linux.

FreeST (fst) allows GNU/Linux users to use native Windows VST plug-ins by using parts of the WINE emulator. It is supported by such programs as Ardour and JACK Audio Connection Kit. This requires the Steinberg SDK. FST and jack_fst wrap the VST plug-ins as JACK clients and display the graphical user interfaces in separate windows. The plugins can then be controlled by MIDI, often using a sequencer such as Rosegarden. A similar solution is to use dssi_vst, which wraps VST plug-ins in a DSSI plug-in, thereby allowing VST plug-ins to be used with programs that have DSSI support. This solution was used in the commercial Linux distribution Studio to Go! from Fervent Software. The music program LMMS also features VST support through "LMMS VST Support Layer". All of these solutions but LMMS require Steinberg's SDK for compilation in addition to Wine and Wine's development files, whose package is typically named 'wine-devel'.

Alternatively, one can try to run VST-hosting Windows programs by using Wine. This has been known to work with Jeskola Buzz (instructions), Modplug Tracker 1.16, and recent versions of REAPER can be run with recent versions of Wine.

Programming Languages

Steinberg's VST SDK is a set of C++ classes based around an underlying C API. The SDK can be downloaded from their website.

There are several ports available, such as a Delphi version by Frederic Vanmol, a JAVA version from the jVSTwRapper project at sourceforge.net, and a .Net version - Noise.

In addition, Steinberg have developed the VST GUI, which is another set of C++ classes, which can be used to build a graphical interface. There are classes for buttons, sliders and displays etc. Note that these are low level C++ classes and the look and feel still have to be created by the plugin manufacturer.

External links

Steinberg - The software company that developed the VST standard.

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