Building Your Own VSTs With Romplur?
Courtesy of BandLab
Music producers can create their own VSTs without coding experience; this idea has been around now for several years. Just this week, Romplur put out a press release titled “Hit-Boy Partners with Romplur to Transform Beatmakers into Software Entrepreneurs, Creating New Revenue Streams for Music Creators Worldwide”. It’s a genius marketing headliner. The content is a little skewed, though—if you’re someone who’s never heard of this idea.
The Gist
Hitboy, a grammy award winning producer who’s worked with some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, is working with his manager Nima Nasseri, and Evin Groves of StudioLinked to support Romplur. Romplur is a platform for generating your own VST plugins without having to know code. You can build your own signature sound software, and sell it to generate extra income.
This is not a new idea, however. Enter The Maize.
MaizeSoft is a website that offers Maize Sampler 2, a cross-platform tool for sound developers to create sample-based virtual instruments. It’s a visual tool that requires absolutely no programming experience, and has similarities to Romplur. Their website sucks, though. It would definitely turn off most people looking for a no code solution to building out their own VSTs.
And before this, we had HISE. HISE began its development back in 2014. HISE is an open source audio application for building virtual instruments, and it’s an open source competitor to Kontakt. The GPL v3 open-source license grants you complete freedom to create, distribute, and sell your own work.
The reason platforms like Romplur and Maize are gaining success over this OS option is because HISE does require a light understanding of coding concepts. You don’t have to be a programmer, but you do need to know basic theories like variables, functions, and control flow. They do have a forum of very excitable programmers ready to answer questions and a few video tutorials. Too much of a learning curve for most people, though.
Let’s revisit Romplur for a second…
It’s a relatively new company; they started around two years ago. There will be some time involved in working out bugs and kinks because of this. Reddit is full of displeased users claiming bad support. The interface is a lot cleaner and easier to use than Maize, and it’s not as complex as HISE or Maize Sampler 2.
If you want less buggy and more guaranteed ways to develop a VST, we would suggest learning some light Java Script concepts and taking the time to learn HISE. Their support forums are very active. If you really want a chance to try building VSTs with no coding experience at all and want to risk trying out Romplur, we’d suggest using every minute possible of their week-long trial to see if you can handle it first.
The pros of Romplur:
Coloring tools that mirror the way Adobe Photoshop operates
They have their own Marketplace where users can sell their products.
You can export your newly developed VST as a Mac or PC installer for customers
Cons of Romplur:
A lot of reviews stating users couldn’t find a way to cancel their subscriptions; admittedly, that option is hard to find in the account.
Bad reviews of the parent company, StudioLinked
Bugs affecting performance that will have to be sorted out while the company is new
Building your own VSTs absolutely offers the opportunity to make some money on the side for musicians looking for side hustles. The going rate of a good quality sound library is 50 to 100 dollars, and even more if you’re building one that is licensable by Kontakt. As AI gets smarter, it’s going to be easier to generate the code necessary to use platforms like HISE. And thinking bigger is always an option; most company startups don’t have original ideas. They’re borrowing from someone else. So who’s to say there won’t be an opportunity to mirror Romplur’s MO and start your own VST visual building website?
Always be on the lookout for a good hustle. Money is everywhere.
