Need 64-bit version of qm-vamp-plugins.dll for Windows

[Gilrock]

I'm working on a freeware light control program called xLights.  Last year one of our developers used your plugin host sdk to give our program features to analyze audio for the purpose of creating timing marks aligned with beats or bars or the other types of plugins you provide.  Prior to that our users always used Audacity to create timing marks and then we had the capability to import the text file exported from Audacity.

I didn't do that initial coding but I'm converting our application to 64-bit.  I got everything running but a user noticed the qm vamp plugins weren't showing up as an option for creating timing tracks.  I inspected the DLL header with dumpbin and see it's 32 bit so I assume that's the reason.  I've searched a lot and can't find a 64-bit version of the DLL for Windows anywhere.  Has it really never been created?  Our program is multi-platform so we already have all this stuff working in 64-bit on MacOS and Linux.  I thought I could just build it myself but the source code appears to list several .lib files in the build directory so I was anticipating problems with those being 32-bit.

Thanks,
Gil

[cannam]

It's true that there has never been a 64-bit Windows build of the QM Vamp Plugins. Making one is a priority for us once SV v3.0 is out.

There are various reasons why few Vamp plugins are available in 64-bit builds for Windows.

The proximate reason is that none of the most widely-used Vamp hosts (Sonic Visualiser, Sonic Annotator, Audacity) exists in a 64-bit Windows version. Since 32-bit hosts can't load 64-bit plugins, there's no pressing reason to produce 64-bit plugins. This will change with Sonic Visualiser v3.0, which for the first time will have a 64-bit Windows build, as well as an adapter that allows it to load 32-bit plugins (out-of-process). So SV v3.0 can continue to use the 32-bit Windows plugins, but also provides more of an incentive to produce 64-bit ones.

In a way this can be attributed to Microsoft's success at providing excellent 32-bit compatibility in 64-bit Windows. On both Linux and OSX we have already had to face the issue of requiring all existing plugins to be rebuilt in 64-bit versions because the underlying platform standard changed. This has never been forced on anyone in the Windows world.

Finally there are various practical reasons, such as that many of the 32-bit Windows plugin builds have been produced using the MinGW compiler which until recently was not readily available in a stable 64-bit version. (I think until fairly recently the 64-bit Visual C++ compiler wasn't included in the free version of Visual Studio either?) So it's not just a question of using the same native platform compiler on the newer platform and getting a new build for the new architecture, as it has been on both Linux and OSX.

The QM plugin set is relatively tricky to rebuild as well, because of its use of LAPACK and BLAS.

Anyway, that's the explanation -- the short answer is that a 64-bit version is "planned soon".


Chris