what's the “best” approach to creating the UI of an audio plugin that will be both audio unit and VST for OS X and Windows?

Question

I'm working on a couple audio plugins. Right now, they are audio units. And while the "DSP" code won't change for the most part between implementations / ports, I'm not sure how to go about the GUI.

For instance, I was looking at the Apple-supplied AUs in Lion. Does anyone know how did they go about the UI? Like, are the knobs and controls just subclasses of Cocoa controls? are they using some separate framework or coding these knobs and such from scratch?

And then, the plugs I'm working on are going to be available too as VSTs for Windows. I already have them up and running with generic interfaces. But I'm wondering if I should just get over it and recreate all my interfaces with the vstgui code provided by Steinberg or if there's a more practical approach to making the interfaces cross-platform.

Answer 1

VSTGUI is not very much fun to work with, especially as your interface gets to be more complicated. The source is a mess and you end up with a very hardcoded GUI, which becomes difficult to refactor.

I'd recommend checking out Juce, which includes a nice GUI builder. If your DSP code is well modularized, switching to its architecture won't be so painful. As an added bonus, it will make the x-platform (where "platform" means both OS and underlying plugin platform) jumps a bit easier for you.