First of all, I’m very new to this forum. I used to own Cubase but sold it to a friend in need. He loves it, and I loved Cubase too despite the fact that the workflow just wasn’t ‘fast’ enough for me (that was it really, everything else I ADORED). Nonetheless, I am not currently a Cubase user (sry 
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Second of all, this question isn’t related to VST usage in general. Everything for me is VST, and frankly, it’s the best platform out there (it makes my Virus TI awesome to have lol).
The main point of this is VST Development. I’ve always wanted to develop my own VST plugin. I talked to Urs Heckmann of U-he and he gave me some pointers as to where to start with the basics. I’ve had several years of C++, a year of C, and I am attempting to learn the VST 3 SDK.
Frankly, I’ve never seen a more sparsely documented SDK in my life, with almost no decent place or template for beginners to start (I mean, AGain is only a small example without very much depth into what is required and what isn’t in terms of methods/headers/interfaces/etc., per se). I want to create a VST instrument but the templates that come with the SDK are only for effects and are poorly commented or not commented at all. I literally had to go back and read the documentation for the VST Module SDK to understand what was going on. I understand that the processing and controller blocks are separate, that the processing is done per iterating through a sample frame (in reverse might I add), etc. I have no understanding still of how MIDI events work, though I understand how parameters are created and used. I have the necessary understanding of DSP, but it’s just this framework that’s giving me a challenge.
My other real problem is developing a VST outside of Visual Studio. I would like to use something like MinGW g++ to compile a VST but finding a way to do this has been almost impossible since there is almost always an error in ftypes.h which prevents compilation (uses i64 instead of LL suffix), and/or it has complained that it needs files only available in the Windows SDK… it’s just painful…
I guess I have just two real questions:
- Does anyone know how to compile a VST3 using MinGW? Is this possible? If so, would you be able to supply a Unix makefile?
- Does anyone have a template (Visual Studio I guess, but I would much prefer .cpp and .h files with a Makefile) that has just the required methods/interfaces/headers to implement the most minimal interface to develop a VST instrument (I’d prefer something commented)? I’d just like to see a decent VST3 example for a softsynth.
Sorry about the rant, but thanks if anybody here can help at all. There are no tutorials, books, etc. yet written on the subject of VST3 development… I wish somebody would write a book on this 
Regards,
Jon