VSTScanner for Cubase/Nuendo

Developer VST 3 SDK
1

Dear VST Plug-in Developer,

In order to improve the overall stability of our sequencer applications we will introduce a Plug-in Scanner which scans every plug-in (only 64-Bit) in its own process. This occurs during the start-up phase of the sequencer, or in the case of a plug-in re-scan is initiated by the user, from within the sequencer application.

Plug-ins that crash during the plug-in scan will get added to a black-list, and are excluded from the sequencer environment.

To ensure your plug-ins will be readily available to users in our future sequencer releases, we encourage you to verify your plug-in’s operation with our Plug-in Scanner. In order to achieve this as efficiently as possible, we are providing you with a 64-Bit VST3 and VST2 command line app for Windows and OSX.

So, how does it work?

  1. Run the command line app:
vst2scanner -p fullpathToYourPlugin
vstscanner -p fullpathToYourPlugin
  1. Check the output
    ——————————————————————————————————————————
    if everything went fine the output will look like this for VST3 Plugins:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<plugin>
…
</plugin>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classInfos>
<class>
…
</class>
<class>
…
</class>
<class>
…
</class>
</classInfos>

Please ensure the output contains the information about the plugin and its classes.
Additionally please make sure that your plugins do not display an Alert message during the scan process. If you need such a message please contact us.

——————————————————————————————————————————
The output for VST2 plugins looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<vst2xplugin>
<path>
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST/yourplugin.vst
</path>
<subCategory>
Fx
</subCategory>
<cid>
theCID
</cid>
<editorCid>
theCID
</editorCid>
…

</vst2xplugin>

——————————————————————————————————————————

On OSX, we perform a check that intentionally leads to a crash, to identify if your plug-in is affected by an Objective-C runtime corruption bug in the OSX System.

What do you have to do if your plug-in crashes on OSX during the scan process?
As far as we know these plug-ins are built with Deployment Target 10.7.
There are two options to fix the problem:

  1. Set the Deployment Target of your plug-in to at least Version 10.8
  2. Uncheck the „Implicitly Link Objective-C runtime Library“ in the Xcode Project settings.

When you rebuild your plug-in with these settings the crash should no longer happen and your plug-in should pass the scan process successfully.

We have already informed Apple about this bug.

Please download the command line tools attached to this post.
vstscanner.zip (1.95 MB)
If you have any problems please contact us: scannersupport@steinberg.de

——————————————————————————————————————————
Update Dec 13, 2016:
——————————————————————————————————————————
These versions are mainly the ones bundled with Cubase 9.0.1 besides one bug fix for VST3 plug-ins that include the ampersand character in their filename.

They are also signed now on macOS.
vstscanner_2016_12.zip (2 MB)

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