The IEM Plug-in Suite is a free and Open-Source audio plug-in suite including Ambisonic plug-ins up to 7th order created by staff and students of the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics.
The suite provides plug-ins for a full Ambisonic production: encoders, reverbs, dynamics including limiter and multi-band compression, rotators, and decoders for both headphones and arbitrary loudspeaker layouts, and many more. The plug-ins are created with the JUCE framework and can be compiled to any major plug-in format (VST, VST3, LV2, AU, AAX).
All the plug-ins can be built as standalones, e.g. for use with JACK or virtual soundcards.
For more information, installation guides and plug-in descriptions see:
- Website: https://plugins.iem.at
- Repository: https://git.iem.at/audioplugins/IEMPluginSuite/
The IEM Plug-in Suite can be built using CMake (see commands below) and already comes with the JUCE dependency as a git submodule. The general system requirements are listed in the JUCE Repository.
Before compiling on Linux, some dependencies must be met. For Ubuntu (and most likely the majority of Debian-based systems), those are listed in the JUCE docs. Alternatively, if source code repositories are enabled, you can get them with
apt-get build-dep iem-plugin-suiteOn RMP-based systems (e.g. Fedora), dependencies are installed with
dnf install alsa-lib-devel fftw-devel findutils freetype-devel gcc-c++ \
libX11-devel libXcursor-devel curl-devel libXinerama-devel \
libXrandr-devel libglvnd-devel make \
pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-devel pkgconf-pkg-config \
unzip util-linux which xorg-x11-server-XvfbPlease note, that we are testing the plug-ins only on Debian and cannot guarantee operation on other distributions.
The BinauralDecoder plug-ins uses fast convolution for decoding the Ambisonic signals to binaural ear signals. Fast convolution relies on the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to make the convolution more efficient. There are several DFT engines around, Apple comes with VDSP, and also JUCE comes with one, which should be considered as a fallback as its not very optimized. For the remaining platforms Windows and Linux the fftw3 library is recommended. On Linux, you can simply install the libfftw3-dev package (for the static library) and you should be all set.
On Windows, you will need to download the source code from http://fftw.org/download.html (e.g. fftw-3.3.10.tar.gz) and unpack it into an fftw directory in the root of this repository, so that the FFTW's CMakeLists.txt is placed into <directoryofthisreadme>/fftw/CMakeLists.txt. That way, the IEM Plug-in Suite CMake project can find it!
Take a look at CMakeLists.txt, in the top you can select which plug-ins you want to build. Either leave it unchanged to build all of them, or comment non-wanted out.
Per default, the plug-ins will be build as standalones only. Additionally, you can build VST2, VST3 and LV2 versions of the plug-ins. Either change the IEM_BUILD_VST2, IEM_BUILD_VST3, and IEM_BUILD_LV2 options directly in the CMakeLists.txt, or use cmake command line flags to change them:
cmake .. -DIEM_BUILD_VST2=ON -DIEM_BUILD_VST3=ON -DIEM_BUILD_LV2=ON -DIEM_BUILD_STANDALONE=ONHowever, there are some drawbacks with the VST3 and LV2 versions (see below). For use in your DAW, we highly recommend the precompiled VST2's.
That's how it all began, however, time has passed and now you'll need to get hold of the VST2SDK to build the VST2 version of the suite. In case you are successful, you unlock the full potential of the IEM Plug-in Suite, as the VST3 and LV2 version have some drawbacks (see below).
To let the build system know where to find the SDK, use the VST2SDKPATH variable:
cmake .. -DIEM_BUILD_VST2=ON -DVST2SDKPATH="pathtothesdk"If you want to use the plug-ins outside a plug-in host, standalone versions can become quite handy! With them enabled, executables will be built which can be used with virtual soundcards of even JACK.
In case you don't want the pliug-ins with JACK support, simply deactivate it: -DIEM_STANDALONE_JACK_SUPPORT=OFF. JACK is only supported on macOS and Linux.
Okay, okay, enough with all those options, you came here to built, right?
Start up your shell and use the following:
mkdir build # creates a build folder, recommended!
cd build # enter it
# execute cmake and let it look for the project in the parent folder
# feel free to add those optiones from above
# for using an IDE use cmake' s -G flag like -G Xcode
cmake ..
# use "--config Release" for optimized release builds
cmake --build . --config Release # build the plug-ins / standalones
# alternatively, open the xcode project, msvc solution, or whatever floats your development boatLet's talk about the elephant in the room: VST3.
Currently, the VST3 versions aren't working reliable above 3rd order and are therefore not provided as compiled binaries. You can however use a previous release which works up to 6th order or compile them on your own.
There's an issue with the channel-layout behavior of the VST3 versions of the plug-ins. This issue comes down to the VST3 SDK and has to be fixed by Steinberg. You'll find the issue here. There is currently some motion regarding this problem, so there's a chance that VST3's will work in future releases to full extent.
At the moment, it's not possible with in LV2 format to get the currently available channel count. Therefore, the automatic Ambisonic order selection does not work, defaulting to 7th order regardless of the selected layout.
So in order to use the plug-ins correctly, you'll have to set the order manually in each plugin. This is missing feature in the LV2 standard and therefore out of our control. We already opened an issue/feature request, but can't say if and when this will be supported.
There was a bug with LV2 plug-ins in REAPER on macOS, which causes the DAW to crash when the plug-in is removed. This issue is fixed with REAPER 6.74.
- https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin/releases: to use the plug-ins in PD and SuperCollider
- https://git.iem.at/ressi/iempluginosc: to control the plug-ins using the OSC interface but without an OSC connection