Reloading .csd requires removal of plugin?

[tobiah]

I was just curious why one must remove and replace the cabbage plugin after
making changes to the .csd. I don’t know much about VST. Why can’t the
plugin just check the date on the file and reload. Is that outside the sandbox?
What if a special MIDI sequence was sent to trigger the reload?

I’m sure this has been thought of. I was just curious. My interest centers
around my desire to programmatically generate scores and have them play
in a DAW. It is a bit of a drag to have to dump and reload the VST each time.

[rorywalsh]

I was just curious why one must remove and replace the cabbage plugin aftermaking changes to the .csd.

If Csound is recompiled while the host is playing, it can lead to problems. Although, there shouldn’t be any issues if the host is currently stopped. The real issue is if you add control parameters to the instrument that is currently instantiated. VST cannot handle the dynamic updating of parameters. So if your plugin uses 4 sliders, it will need to continue to use 4 sliders for as long as it’s instantiated.

If you are not using parameters and simply want an instance to Csound inside your DAW that you can recompile on the fly, maybe you could look at CsoundVST by Mike Goggins?

Why can’t theplugin just check the date on the file and reload.

As outlined above, if Csound decides to recompile while the DAW is ‘playing’ you will most likely get a crash.

It is a bit of a drag to have to dump and reload the VST each time.

Agreed. The quickest way is usually to simply reload the session.