New Pro Tools plugin format: AAX

[myk]

Has anyone made any significant progress with it that they wouldn't mind sharing? I'm hoping to free up some schedule time towards the back end of this week to pick up AAX again so any tips/pointers people can offer would be very appreciated.

Myk

[Mikey]

Nothing here, I'm afraid. Waiting like you.

[Mikey]

Good news and bad. I actually got an AAX plug to build under XCode 4.4 (GM). That's the first plugin I've gotten that far with. Booted up ProTools and got audio! Of course it's not quite what I'd hoped for. A quiet oscillation, getting louder and louder louder and sending me scrambling for the level knob in my studio. If only that's what I wanted I'd be done now.

[valhallasound]

Good news and bad. I actually got an AAX plug to build under XCode 4.4 (GM). That's the first plugin I've gotten that far with. Booted up ProTools and got audio! Of course it's not quite what I'd hoped for. A quiet oscillation, getting louder and louder louder and sending me scrambling for the level knob in my studio. If only that's what I wanted I'd be done now.

I'd let your marketing department figure out how to sell it.

This is actually great news. Have you tried the plugin as a VST or AU? I tend to develop the plugin as a VST/AU, and test in Ableton Live, then move on to the more "finicky" hosts (*cough cough Logic cough cough*) once the audio and GUI is working in Live.

Sean Costello

[Mikey]

This is actually great news. Have you tried the plugin as a VST or AU? I tend to develop the plugin as a VST/AU, and test in Ableton Live, then move on to the more "finicky" hosts (*cough cough Logic cough cough*) once the audio and GUI is working in Live.

Hi Sean,
I've actually had the plugin running as AU/VST/RTAS for quite some time. It's the change to XCode 4.4 bit that makes it an adventure. Plug's now running fine under VST but I'm still running into build issues on AU and RTAS.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

The plugin shows as available inside ProTools. When I attempt to load it it doesn't crash, but I don't get a UI.

Ditto with 2.0.22

Rail

[Salvator]

Parameters are not exposed to protools either.

Salvator

[PaulTapper]

Jules...

Seems like there's quite a lot of demand for this feature. Is this something that you're actively working on, or is it on a back burner for you?

My ideal situation, of course, would be that you got it all working and we could just update to get your goodness, but I don't know where its sitting in your priorities right now.

Please could you give us an idea about whether this is something you're going to be checking in more stuff for in the near future which we could get, or are we better carrying on from here ourselves?

Thanks

Paul

[jules]

Please could you give us an idea about whether this is something you're going to be checking in more stuff for in the near future which we could get, or are we better carrying on from here ourselves?

I'm working on about 5 different projects right now, and AAX is just one of them! I'm going to spend a couple of days on it next week, so will hopefully make a bit more progress with it - hopefully when it reaches the point where the basic playback works, then people will start joining in and helping out a bit more to finish off the details..

[PaulTapper]

Thanks Jules, I appreciate it.

[Mikey]

I'm a little surprised that nobody has beaten me to this comment. A couple of days back, there was a note in the tip code indicating that more work had been done with AAX. I was busy in a few other corners and didn't have a chance to try until today. Although I'm sure there's still much to do, I'm happy to report that I got two plugins working (OSX)--audio and UI! That's great.

It appears that PT10 does do the cert check beforehand, so you'll probably have to be a Pace licensee to make it work. But work it does! Thanks Jules.

[Salvator]

Yes, had no time to comment (or deep test) either, but it worked for me too. Exiting !
Jules, what does mean the comment in the commit ? (i.e "got basic audio").
What's left exactly ?

Salvator

[jules]

Yes, had no time to comment (or deep test) either, but it worked for me too. Exiting !
Jules, what does mean the comment in the commit ? (i.e "got basic audio").
What's left exactly ?

Salvator

Well, I only gave it a very quick test! I've also not done any kind of parameter or state saving support yet.

[Mikey]

I've discovered a few more issues with AAX. The first is that I can't build under XCode 3.2.6. I'm using XCode 4.4.1 for my own work, but I'm doing some client work and the client would like the option of using XCode 3. The problem arises somewhere around juce_AAX_Wrapper.mm. Even though I've tried an exclusion macro, it seems that it's getting multiple includes. This manifests itself as a error message indicating that 'Component' is already declared. I've spent a while trying to sort it out, but I've got to move on to some other things.

The other issue comes when I'm loading plugins under ProTools 10. The name of the plugin isn't properly exported to PT. Instead of the plugin name, sometimes I see the 4-character product code and sometimes I see the comment. Sometimes I even see the plugin name.

Jules I know you're busy with lots of things, but it would be nice to see you swing through the AAX neighborhood again.

[Mikey]

Not much activity on the AAX front in recent weeks. I've seen a lot of checkins regarding Introjucer (which is of little practical value to many of us), while there are still a number of outstanding issues with AAX. With AES coming up in a little over a month, I know I'm not alone in feeling a little anxious about the state of it. Jules, what can you tell us about your ability to give some attention to AAX?