Building KV-Element.vst3 on a Mac

[jonwilts]

Hello. New to Element; have searched the docs & discussions but can't figure this out.

I'm on an M1 Mac with latest OS (15.5) and fully updated Homebrew. I've managed to build the Element app from latest github main branch. This required a little more work than the build documentation:

1. in element/meson/osx.ini change boost_root to the path for boost. In my case, this was boost_root = '/opt/homebrew/include'
2. download vstsdk2.4 from https://archive.org/details/VST2SDK. Unzip it into a directory, then again in element/meson/osx.ini change vst2sdk to point to that directory, e.g. vst2sdk = '/Users/me/Code/packages/vstsdk2.4'
3. for me the build then failed with an error in element/src/lua/sol/sol/sol.hpp around line 6059 - if you get this error, edit that file & change:

this->construct(std::forward<Args>(args)...);

to

/// this->construct(std::forward<Args>(args)...);
new (static_cast<void*>(this)) optional(std::in_place, std::forward<Args>(args)...);
return **this; 

At that point, the Element app built and ran successfully for me.

What I can't figure out is how to now build the vst3 plugin that will let me use Element in my DAW. Any clues?

Thank you!

[mfisher31]

You need to enable the "element-plugins" option. See meson_options.txt

[jonwilts]

Thank you.

Edited meson_options.txt and set element-plugins to enabled. The build then failed because the version of vst2sdk I'd downloaded from the Internet Archive was, presumably, too old.

Instead I cloned https://github.com/RomanKubiak/ctrlr and set vst2sdk = '/Users/me/Code/packages/ctrlr/Source/Misc/vst2sdk' in element/meson/osx.ini and the build then succeeded.

Initially I moved element/build/plugins/effect/vst3/bundle/KV-Element-FX.vst3 to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 and restarted my DAW, but my DAW couldn't/wouldn't see the plugin (no errors, just wasn't shown). It did show up in OwlPlug, so fairly sure this is a DAW problem.

So, instead I moved element/build/plugins/effect/au/KV-Element-FX.component to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components and now it works beautifully.

Thank you for the pointer. Hopefully this will be useful for someone else trying to build.