VSTGUI Introduction

Providing an interface to your Plug-In makes you be immediately confronted with platform specifics of different windows handling and event handling models.
For this very reason, the VSTGUI libraries have been created. These are available for all supported platforms and make the handling of user interaction with a graphic-rich user interface also cross-platform.
Thus they propose common objects for plugs's GUI, like knobs, sliders ...and of course nothing prevents you from adding via inheritance any more specific components you should need.

The only proviso to the cross-platform property of VSTGUI is that you need to be able to convert your source graphics from one platform format to another. But many third-parts tools help you to do this quickly and simply.

You can find a Plugin example using some controls in the SDK (see under Examples), you can find on the Steinberg web 3rd Party Developers some links to web page proposing some extended Control objects.

The source code of VSTGUI is included in this SDK and is under the following Licensing:


Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
  • Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  • Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  • Neither the name of the Steinberg Media Technologies nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
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