Topic: Audacity and screwy handling of VST plugins, one solution for a few MDA plugins

[Brian Skalinder]

There are a few functions missing or with which I'm unhappy in Audacity.  And at the same time, I've found very few free VST plugins for dither, compression, and M-S decoding.  Of those I've found, none work well due to Audacity's limitations in displaying VST plugins - it displays a generic UI with no custom graphics, data values, or controls, only very basic sliders and generic data values (0.0 - 1.0):

For example, see the attached images:

• vst_properUI.jpg - what the plugin UI should look like
  
• vst_audacity.jpg - what the plugin UI actually looks like in Audacity
  
  

As you can see, the sliders and data values are screwy, and there's no support for presets.

BUT, while some VST plugins are flat-out unworkable, so far I've liked reasonably well the MDA plugins I've tried (dither, compression, and M-S decoding) and found a way to map Audacity's generic UI sliders and data values so the plugins are workable.  I thought others might be interested, too.  See the attached (zipped) XLS for details.