What is Conformal?

Conformal is a framework for building audio plug-ins using TypeScript and Rust. But what actually is it? Really, Conformal is four things:

Abstractions that define the building blocks of an audio plug-in — you implement these to create yours.
Wrappers that turn your implementation into standard plug-in formats.
Tools for building and distributing your plug-ins.
Helper libraries for common tasks like polyphonic synthesis.

For a guided tour of the framework, please see the build your first plug-in tutorial.

If you’re already familiar with Conformal but you want to start a new project, use bun create conformal to create a new project that already has the basics set up for you.

For a better understanding of how a Conformal project is set up, please read on - we’ll take a quick look at how these parts fit together to actually create a distributable plug-in!

Abstractions

In Conformal, you as the plug-in author have to write two main pieces of code:

Signal processing code in Rust. This code must implement the Component trait.
User interface code in TypeScript. This is a web-based user interface that can connect to plugin settings by using the @conformal/plugin package.

Wrappers

Once you have these two pieces of code, you can use a wrapper to turn them into a standard plug-in format. Currently, Conformal supports VST synth and effect plug-ins on macOS and Windows, but we hope to support more platforms, plug-in types and plug-in formats in the future.

Note that the VST wrapper is already set up in the template project created by bun create conformal, so you can start building your plug-in right away. However, here’s how you’d do it from scratch

Make a rust crate containing the wrapped binary

This should be a new crate of the cdylib type. This should use the wrap_factory to define the entry-points necessary for the plug-in.

Make a `bundle.json` file in your UI package

This defines some additional metadata conformal needs to know about your plug-in, and also defines which crate implements the VST.

Tools

Once you have a wrapped plug-in crate and a bundle.json file that refers to it, you can use the conformal-scripts package command to create the plug-in.

The included scripts can also help to create a macOS installer for your plug-in, see the macOS installers guide.

Helper libraries

Conformal includes helper libraries for common tasks in audio plug-in development. For example, the conformal_poly crate includes helper functions for polyphonic synthesizers.