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NIH-plug

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NIH-plug is an API-agnostic audio plugin framework written in Rust, as well as a small collection of plugins. The idea is to have a stateful yet simple plugin API that gets rid of as much unnecessary ceremony wherever possible, while also keeping the amount of magic to minimum and making it easy to experiment with different approaches to things. See the current features section for more information on the project's current status.

Check out the documentation, or use the cookiecutter template to quickly get started with NIH-plug.

Table of contents

Plugins

Check each plugin's readme file for more details on what the plugin actually does. You can download the development binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS from the automated builds page. Or if you're not signed in on GitHub, then you can also find the latest nightly build here. You may need to disable Gatekeeper on macOS to be able to use the plugins.

Scroll down for more information on the underlying plugin framework.

Framework

Current features

Building

NIH-plug works with the latest stable Rust compiler.

After installing Rust, you can compile any of the plugins in the plugins directory in the following way, replacing gain with the name of the plugin:

cargo xtask bundle gain --release

Plugin formats

NIH-plug can currently export VST3 and CLAP plugins. Exporting a specific plugin format for a plugin is as simple as calling the nih_export_<format>!(Foo); macro. The cargo xtask bundle command will detect which plugin formats your plugin supports and create the appropriate bundles accordingly, even when cross compiling.

Example plugins

The best way to get an idea for what the API looks like is to look at the examples.

Licensing

The framework, its libraries, and the example plugins in plugins/examples/ are all licensed under the ISC license. However, the VST3 bindings used by nih_export_vst3!() are licensed under the GPLv3 license. This means that unless you replace these bindings with your own bindings made from scratch, any VST3 plugins built with NIH-plug need to be able to comply with the terms of the GPLv3 license.

The other plugins in the plugins/ directory may be licensed under the GPLv3 license. Check the plugin's Cargo.toml file for more information.