Generating VST Plugins With ChatGPT

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2024-05-07 08:00:07

I've been doing weekly beats this year and it has been a lot of eustress fun (my best song so far is "smectite canyon gambit"). I found a nice positive feedback loop between composing electronic music and writing software for dopeloop.ai. Composing helps me figure out which features are important on the software side.

In recent weeks I've been tinkering with Protoplug. It's a piece of open source software which allows you to write VST plugins in Lua. It turns out Lua is efficient enough to do DSP processing on modern CPUs. You can write the code interactively in the embedded editor, which makes for a smooth iterative workflow. I am using Protoplug with OpenMPT as a host running on Wine and really enjoying it.

After tinkering for a bit I had the idea to take the Protoplug API and some examples and feed them to ChatGPT to see if it could generate plugins from a written description. If you want to try it yourself you can go here: LuaVST GPT. Note, I am using GPT-4 and I haven't tested this with GPT-3.5. You will need to install the Protoplug VST into your host and then copy the code from the chat session into the VST's built-in editor.

An example of a session that went well was when I used an online graphing calculator to come up with a distortion algorithm, and then I gave the equation to the GPT and asked it to write a plugin. I tweaked the code a little bit but on the whole it was a good implementation and did what I wanted. A distortion algorithm is one of the simpler types of plugins to code from scratch of course.