Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2Anatomy of an Audio Plugin

The first thing to understand about the audio plugin specifications for AAX, AU, and VST3 is this: they are all fundamentally the same and they all implement the same sets of attributes and behaviors tailored specifically to the problem of packaging audio signal processing software in a pseudo-generic way. Plugins are encapsulated in C++ objects, derived from a specified base class, or set of base classes, that the manufacturer provides. The plugin host instantiates the plugin object and receives a base class pointer to the newly created object. The host may call only those functions that it has defined in the API, and the plugin is required to implement those functions correctly in order to be considered a ...