TL;DR: I wrote a VST plugin to control vidOS, check out the readme or download it here
Ever since the Mezzz and vidOS first came out, I’ve been trying to get vidOS working with Ableton in a clean way. This won’t work using the standard tools (including M4L) as long as Ableton insists on zeroing certain CCs on playback stop and blocking others from reaching your device at all.
So I wrote a little JUCE based application that implements as much of the Mezzz + vidOS protocol as possible, with an interface organized like the Mezzz. If you run it as a plugin inside Ableton or another VST3 host, most of the parameters are automatable, leading to some very cool synced visualization possibilities. It’ll even work when running vidOS on a separate device over Bluetooth MIDI.
Check it out and tell me what you think! (Links at the top) Pull requests, feedback, issues, whatever are most welcome. The code is stable enough under my testing, but neither C++ or JUCE are home turf for me, so there’s definitely a few things to iron out.
Finally: the strategy from the Sleepy Circuits team, releasing the app for free and using standard MIDI CCs for control lead me to think that this sort of open source effort to build tools around vidOS would be kosher but if I’m stepping on any toes let’s talk, not trying to make life harder for anyone.
3 Likes
Oh wow cool! I dont use VSTs or DAWs much but hopefully the DAW people will enjoy this one! Should be a nice combo with the modulation lanes in your Ableton or whatever.
Cool you figured out some of the sysex, the back n forth strings may change though I can’t promise that will stay thesame because I seem to keep finding more ways that its lacking. An issue I found recently is that stuff often breaks in ridiculous ways if versions are out of sync so the new Mezzz firmware responds to “version_request,” with “version, float,” so you may want to send the version number of the Mezzz firmware this is meant to emulate if you want vidOS to show a warning to the user in future updates.
Nice work! Saves us having to write some plugin for the Ableton folks like we did for Hypno. (never broke even doing that anyway lol)
Also just a note to users of this: please dont expect/request 1st party Sleepy support on using this vst as we have limited bandwidth and need to focus on delivering the best experience possible for our hardware users since thats the primary way we make money over here.
1 Like
Thanks for the kind words!
Fully expecting the SysEx interface to change, that’s just the price you pay when reverse engineering stuff. The version message is first on the list once I get bidirectional comms going, good tip.
I’ll also add a note to the readme underlining the unofficial nature of the plugin as well as a link to the new issue page so I don’t cause any support requests for y’all.
1 Like