KandVST

Features

• 4 oscillators capable of generating sine, square, triangle and saw waves simultaneously
• Volume envelope for each oscillator
• Multithreaded 16 note polyphony
• 5 low and high pass filters (one for each oscillator and one master)
• Delay and distortion effects
• Convolution reverb with support for custom impulse responces
• 2 LFOs assignable to multiple parameters

Download

Pre-built binaries for Windows and Linux are available at releases

Usage notes

Copy the pre-built .dll (Windows VST2) or .vst3 file into your DAW's plugin directory or simply run the standalone version. Custom impulse responces, preset files and settings are stored in %appdata%\KandVST on Windows and ~/.config/KandVST on Linux. Custom impulse responces can be placed in the IR folder. Only wave files are supported and longer files will cause more CPU usage. Maximum recommended length is ~10s. The current reverb implementation only supports fixed sized blocks. DAWs that use variable block sizes, such as FL Studio, need to be configured to use fixed block sizes in order for the reverb effect to work (everything else works with variable block sizes).

Cloning

Please note that git lfs is required and should be installed before cloning, see lfs. After git lfs is installed clone the repo using:
git clone https://github.com/VirtualRaven/KandVST.git

Building

The project is tested on linux and windows and can be built using cmake. On linux the project has been tested with both gcc and clang and both the makefile and ninja generators. On windows it has been confirmed to work with Visual Studio 2017.

To build open a terminal in the root of the project folder and execute the following sequence of commands

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

This will configure the project, to then build the project run
cmake --build .

To test the build run (Windows only)
ctest -C Debug

Visual Studio 2017

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 with cmake support one can open the project directly in VS. Select File/Open/CMake and select the file KandVST/CMakeLists.txt.

Testing

The project includes an automatic tester tool aptly named tester. Tests are defined in Tester/Tests/TestName/ and made from the following components

• TestName.h - This class contains an implementation of TestHost::Test named TestName
• params.txt - Contains a list of default values for parameters. The synth parameters are set to these before running the test, any parameter omitted is initialized to it's default value.
• verify.py - A python script runs post test. As an argument it is given the path to the test output folder. Only TestName.h is required, the others are optional. If the scripts considers the test a success, it should return 42.

As long as the test is placed in the correct folder, it is automatically registerd by cmake at generation time, no changes are needed to the testers code.

Unfortunately the tester tool is not supported on linux as it uses the VST3 api, which JUCE (project dependency) does not support on linux platforms.

Test output

All tests output is found in BUILD_FOLDER/Tests/TestName/. If the test writes anything to the msg buffer, a file named log.txt will be created in the folder containing this data. If the test method exportTestData() returns true, then the files data_1.txt and data_2.txt. These files are CSV files contaning raw sound data for the left and right channels.

params.txt

Each line of this file either contains a comment, marked by a #, or it contains a parameter assigment:
PARAM_NAME = 0.1 The right-hand side must be a valid value of the parameter. If the parameter is of continuous type the value must a floating point value. If the parameter is of toggle type it must be one of On,Off,True,False. If the parameter is discrete the value must be an integer inside the parameters range.

The left hand side must be a name of parameter that the plugin export. For example:

 #Enable all osc
 Enable Oscillator 0 = On
 Enable Oscillator 1 = On
 Enable Oscillator 2 = On
 Enable Oscillator 3 = On

To list available parameters, run the tester with the argument params or Params for a more detailed output. Or use the list parameters command in the synth terminal window.

Placing the comment #NORMALIZEDturns off type checking, instead all values are interpreted as normalized floating point values. This only effects rows after the line which the comment appeared on. Similarly #UNNORMALIZED reenables type checking for the rows following it.

Build dependencies

The project uses cmake as the build system, so cmake is required

Linux packages

• libasound2-dev
• libfreetype6-dev
• libcurl-dev
• libxinerama-dev
• libxrandr-dev
• libxcursor-dev
• freeglut3-dev
• libxcomposite-dev
• mesa-common-dev
• libxrender-dev
• PkgConfig

Windows

Visual studio 2017

Additional dependencies

To be able to run all tests and/or to rebuild binary resources python3 is required together with the following python modules

• numpy
• matplotlib
• peakutils