How receive computer keyboard keystrokes in VST3 plugins?

Developer VST 3 SDK
1

My plugin wants to receive keystrokes from the computer keyboard when it has focus, such as up-arrow, down-arrow, and control-Z. That worked fine in VST2. I’m running the VST3 plugin in Cubase 11 and the keystrokes are not getting sent to the plugin: instead, they are getting processed by Cubase.

Is there something I need to do in Cubase 11 on the plugin track to cause the keystrokes to get relayed to the plugin? Or is there some VST3 interface I need to implement in the plugin software? Upgrading to VSTGUI v4.x is not an option.

1 Like
2

this is happening here as well in cubase 11 pro with the Arcade VST 3. Windows 10. it just started sending keystrokes to the host (cubase) after a recent arcade update(1.5). other plugins fine. just Arcade for some reason.

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Thanks for mentioning Windows … the issue I’m reporting above only happens on Windows. On Mac, Cubase 10.5 does send the keystrokes to my VST3 plugin.

4

How do you handle keyboard events at the moment? In VST3 there is the IPlugView interface which is used on Windows to send keyboard events to a plug-in. Maybe you’ve missed it?

5

We are using IPlugView. We did not implement methods ::onKeyDown() or ::onKeyUp() … but still our VST3 plugin correctly received keystrokes from Mac Cubase … but not Windows Cubase.

The Mac keystrokes arrive in our VST3 plugin via VSTGUI 3.6 function VSTGUI_NSView_performKeyEquivalent().

We’ll implement the IPlugView::OnKeyDown() methdods etc and that should fix it.

Thanks!

6

… but it is strange that we did not implement IPlugView::::onWheel() and yet the mouse wheel performs okay in our VST3 plugin on Mac & Windows.