Skip to main content

Wrapping Up the Plugin

We're almost done with our amplifier. The final step is declaring a nectar.Plugin and doing some cross-platform magic

Declaring a nectar.Plugin​

We can declare it like so:

src/main.zig
pub const Plugin = nectar.Plugin(Amplifier, .{
    .unique_id = 45395423,
    .version = .{ 0, 0, 1, 0 },
    .name = "Zig Amplify",
    .vendor = "nectar-examples",
    .initial_delay = 0,

    .features = &.{ .effect },

    .input = &[_]core.Channel{
        .{ .name = "Left" },
        .{ .name = "Right" },
    },
    .output = &[_]core.Channel{
        .{ .name = "Left" },
        .{ .name = "Right" },
    },
}, null);

Some quick notes:

  • You're supposed to actually register your unique_id, but for testing, a good ol' random number will do just fine.
  • The features array defines some of basic capabilties of a plugin. In this case, it's an effect plugin
  • input and output are our IO layouts. If you were making a plugin which didn't take input (say a synth), you could just leave the input array empty

Cross-Platform Stuff​

This ties everything together. We're gonna generate unique code for each supported target, depending on what we declared in our build.zig:

src/main.zig
comptime {
    switch (build_options.pluginType) {
        .vst2 => {
            const Vst2Plugin = nectar.wrapper.vst2.Wrap(Plugin);

            Vst2Plugin.generateExports({});
        },
    }
}
tip

nectar.wrapper stores all the different wrappers for different plugin types. In most cases, it's a matter of calling nectar.wrapper.name.Wrap(Plugin) and then using that to generate the proper exports

Compiling​

Now to build our plugin, we can run this shell command:

zig build vst2

And hopefully, it works!