VST plugin developers have no excuse for not supporting microtuning


I, working alone on a hobby project, added MTS-ESP support to my plugin in 40 minutes, and it only took that long because I made a silly mistake and spent half an hour tracking it down.

For years now I've been grumbling to anyone who'll listen that an instrument you can't tune is just a toy and both hardware and software manufacturers need to consider it as much a part of baseline functionality as MIDI compatibility. Certainly I'd never spend real money on a product that can only do 12EDO. Of course, very few people will listen to me ranting about such things, but I do still think it's true.

For a while my rant has changed to, "VST developers really don't have any excuse because MTS-ESP is so easy to implement". But I had a nagging doubt that maybe I was talking hot air, because although they claim on their website that it "typically takes less than half an hour", I didn't really know whether that was true.

I can confirm that it is. I got it done in 8 minutes if you don't count the half hour I subsequently spent tracking down a very silly slip-up on my part. All I had to do was follow the instructions in the comment at the top of the header file the website told me to include (I didn't even have to write any code, just copy and paste).

To be fair their half-hour estimate couldn't possibly include testing but if you integrate this early you can just include some MTS-ESP scenarios in your test suite and it will get hammered later in the process anyway. So why don't some plugins that cost real money do this by default?

Well, I'll stop grizzling and leave you with a pic of my work in progress -- it's pretty rough at the moment and there's much to do, including with the user interface, so this is a way off being the final version:




Expect a release (and more info) in the next month.