I am just starting out with SC and I am currently trying to understand the mechanics of it.
atm I am using pianotec as a vst plugin and now I would like to add an effect plugin to combine it with.
I don’t care what the plugin does as long as I can hear that it has an effect - I only want to experiment with combining plugins and not produce a specific result.
However my problem is that all the plugins I can find are all either vst3 or lv2, both of which afaik cannot be used with sc.
So how can I find plugins that are usable with sc - is there maybe a curated list somewhere or any other recommendation?
From the documentation of VSTPluginController.open:
~fx.open("GChorus"); // assuming 'GChorus' is in the Server's plugin dictionary.
~fx.open("mda Delay.vst3"); // VST3 plugins always need a '.vst3' extensions
But I have to admit that it could be stated more prominently… The Pd documentation is much clearer in this regard.
that was the bit I was missing - I had assumed (by not reading the docs - sorry) that everything in the .vst3 directory would be treated as a vst3-plugin (and got an error with a vst3 .so) but that is not the case. You can have both vst2 and vst3 plugins in this directory and it’s the extension of the file that matters.
JACK can route any output port to any input port. So you can set ServerOptions in SC to add extra in and out ports (not connected to the soundcard), and in the DAW, configure extra ins/outs similarly. Then patch SC out → DAW in, and DAW out (not the main outputs!) to SC in.
If using MIDI with a plugin this way, note that timing accuracy will depend on the audio hardware buffer size (but timestamped MIDI messages to VSTPlugin will obey the timestamp, and thus get better timing for larger hardware buffers). This matters only for a subset of use cases, though.
You can also do this on the mac using the blackhole audio router, which supports up to 256 channels. It creates a virtual audio card, which you can output to using SuperCollider, and use as input for your DAW.