VST Support

• Jul 13, 2019 - 03:43

Just out of curiosity, what would it take to have built in VST support for MuseScore?

I realize all of the following:
1) MuseScore is primarily a notation software, not a playback software (or DAW).
2) MuseScore already supports VST albeit in a very round-about manner (with JACK).
3) No one who is not willing to contribute in code should complain too much about any features they would like on MuseScore.

With these things in mind, however, I am curious about what kind of coding it would take to get a built in VST player (such as Sibelius has). I am interesting in helping code for this, although I don't know how much use I'll be at it.

I'm trying to understand what goes on behind the scenes in the current version of MuseScore. If someone could take me through the steps of how we get from what I see on the screen to the audio I hear, that would be a great start.

Thanks for any information and I'm grateful for the many improvements in MuseScore 3.

Comments

• Jul 20, 2019 - 11:16

The "big picture" is that all sound processing, be it a usual score playback or audio files exporting, goes through MasterSynthesizer which dispatches it to particular Synthesizers. So, in general, adding a new way of sound rendering should probably involve adding a new Synthesizer subclass which implements its abstract member functions and making it being used by MuseScore by adding the corresponding synthesizer to MasterSynthesizer here.

That is a very general picture though. Maybe some way of disabling Fluid when using VST might be necessary, or some issues of distinguishing between "real-time" and converter modes could arise (VST seems to support this concept but I am not sure about the current state of synthesizers subsystem in MuseScore in this regard). But these issues are certainly not the most important until the new synthesizer shapes into something that already works.

Hope this helps!

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