FreeFrame Development Tips

Developing your own FreeFrame plug-ins? Here's a few tips that I learnt the long way round:

• While it can be a bit of a pain, try to support 16, 24, and 32-bits. If you force the host software to work in a bit depth other than its internal format you're going to incur two conversion hits for every frame.

• Respect the alpha channel if you're working in 32-bit. Several hosts can, and will, use alpha information so set it where it makes sense or at least make everything fully opaque

• Parameter types are generally limited to by hosts to floats/bools (don't know of any software that supports strings)

• processFrame() should always be used if you're doing 1 input -> 1 output. I did try one with processFrameCopy() but it didn't work on several hosts (even though it should!)

• Make your plugin multi-instance capable. Some hosts may have more than one instance of your plugin running. Don't have global data when it should be instance data.

• Ensure your plugin ID's are unique!

• I've done quite a few plugins which start threads, read files, open audio/midi devices, do network access and everything works fine.

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CategoryFreeFrame