[Feature Request] VST Plugin Support

[1Poseidon3]

I'm not at all familiar with the inner workings of this program or how VST plugins work but I was setting up an Elgato Wave XLR and Wave Link for someone earlier and I noticed that Wave Link has support for not only Elgato's own plugins but all VST and VST3 plugins as well and I was wondering if that's even possible to do with GoXLR Utility. Please let me know if it's possible, planned, or not in the scope of the project. Thanks!

[1Poseidon3]

I did a little research and found these repositories, which may or may not be helpful.
https://github.com/RustAudio/vst-rs
https://github.com/jesnor/vst3-rs

[JulanDeAlb]

All the audio processing happens on the device, so VST would need to be added to the device itself or the driver.
Since GoXLR Utility is just a third party software for the device, it's not possible.

You can read more on the GoXLR-Utility Discord if you want.
https://discord.com/channels/1124010710138106017/1134561137833283634

[1Poseidon3]

Ah I understand. So devices like the Elgato Wave XLR and Wave Link must do the audio processing in the software or something? Since I don't want to necro the thread in Discord, I'll just put my musings here but if you were to theoretically rewrite the drivers for the GoXLR to handle VSTs and look for a specific folder through the USB connection that would house the VST plugins, would that be possible? Obviously that is outside the scope of this project but I'm just theorizing and speculating.

[FrostyCoolSlug]

I've not personally used the devices, but my general understanding is that the device itself is simply a 1 input, 1 output device to bring audio in from the XLR port and send audio out to the headphone jack, and the driver itself is responsible for all the mixing and processing before it arrives at WASAPI and is presented to the end user.

In theory, if there was direct control over the driver, it would theoretically be possible to do something similar with the GoXLR, but live monitoring the changes would be tricky due to latency of needing a full round trip.

[1Poseidon3]

Thanks for the insight. Interesting to think about. I'm by no means a driver author/developer but I wonder if one day someone would take up that project especially since Music Tribe laid off the development team early this year if I remember correctly so there would be no more (official) development on official app or the driver, unless I missed some news on the topic. They would probably need some jumping off point though like documentation on the original driver or the source code.

[JulanDeAlb]

Yeah you missed quite a bit. The original team in Canada got laid off but a new team in Denmark picked it up, it just took a bit of time. Currently the SubMix firmware got officially released and a new firmware for a second Stream Mix is in Beta.

[1Poseidon3]

Ah okay. Thank you for the timeline summary. I did notice in GoXLR Utility that it said there was a firmware update and when I opened the official app to do it, it said there was a software update too which I thought was strange. I'm surprised Music Tribe actually got another team on the job. So, this sort of goes off topic now but what are the pros and cons to using GoXLR Utility vs the official GoXLR app if the official app is being actively developed on again? I did a skim over both recently and it seems like there is feature parity between the two.