Plugin to control non-MIDI devices?

Hi, sorry this is a very basic question from a total beginner with VST programming.

I work for an audio device manufacturer who has previously mostly dealt with broadcast and production equipment. We have a new line of products that straddles the line to include musicians and studio usage. Our equipment is not MIDI enabled, it is however network audio/Dante/AVB compatible.

We would like to create a plugin that allows users of Cubase to control the volumes on our inputs and outputs from within Cubase itself.

The devices have a native GUI that can be accessed with a browser using an IP address so the ability to change these parameters over a network connection already exists, we are just looking to take the next step and integrate that control with a VST or whatever process would work.

Is this possible? At this point I’m just trying to determine if this is doable.

Any guidance you could provide would be helpful.

Thanks

As far as I can tell there is nothing built-in in the VST SDK to connect to non-MIDI devices.

That being said, the VST SDK layer lets you do whatever you want. For example, I wrote this plugin called SAM-SPL64 ) which accesses the file system to store temporary samples (SampleFile.cpp). So I can totally imagine you making http calls or opening a socket directly.

I would obviously do this in the UI layer, not the RT (real time) layer, but that is totally possible, just not built-in.

Also if you are interested you may want to check Jamba which lets you bootstrap a VST plugin in a matter of seconds (and in your case, the RT layer is a pass-through which is the default implementation of the blank plugin generated by Jamba…).

Yan

Interesting, I will look into that. Thanks