Ysfx - Reaper JSFX plugins as VST3 for Renoise in Linux

Tips & Tricks
1

So…just stumbled over ssth I wanted to share. Thought it might be a nice inspiration for some, like playing around with new sounds and toys always brings up fresh ideas. For free!

So in the Reaper system there is an audio scripting language called JSFX. Now this is Reaper-internal, and people can program DSP code in a simple Javascript-like language, to have them compiled and running inside Reaper. There are already quite some nice synths and effects around, you can use them all for free and even mess with the code. It is also thought for plugin development rapid prototyping - nice tool overall.

There’s a project called “YSFX”, which enables loading these plugins as VST3 plugins! Nice thing I thought, compiled it, but it didn’t quite work, it’s an old version w/ too many bugs.

Searching on, I found Joep Vanlier’s Github, who not only has some very nice JSFX synths and effects going, but also a patched version of ysfx in his repo. I just tried compiling it, all of his own synths and effects and also that of others seem to work in Renoise on my KUbuntu 24.04.

The plugin compiles as VST3 effect and instrument each, and I was able to load it into renoise and use it. You have a loading bar in the gui at first only, but hitting the “load” button, you can just point it to the JSFX file of a synth/effect, and it will load and run it!

There seems to be no binary releases, you need to build it yourself. Here is what I did in a nutshell, maybe you need to install some more packages or do different steps in another version/distro of Linux. Please drop a comment if you find you’d need more packages or have other info.

First you need the build environment going, i.e.

sudo apt install build-essential cmake git

Then you need to install the dependencies for the JUCE library used by ysfx

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libjack-jackd2-dev \
ladspa-sdk \
libcurl4-openssl-dev \
libfreetype-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
libx11-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxext-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev \
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev \
libglu1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev

Okay let’s start building, go to your Source compilatin directory, and download and compile the software
(remember to use the github from “JoepVanlier”, and not from “jpcima”, it has the proper patches, the other is outdated!)

git clone https://github.com/JoepVanlier/ysfx
cd ysfx/
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . -j

…can also use “RelWithDebInfo” instead of “Release”, to get it debugging ready in case you want to hack it and/or try developing JSFX plugins.

After the last command finished, I had the vst3 plugins installed in “~/.vst3”, and renoise could scan and load them just fine. Now you just need some JSFX file - just download and extract the following respos somewhere, and load the .jsfx files from the ysfx plugin to get the plugins going. No need to compile them.

Here are some repos (from Joep ysfx readme.md). You can just hit the “<> Code” Button in the upper right corner, download, unzip, and point the ysfx plugin to load the individual .jsfx scripts from the archive:

Saike: https://github.com/JoepVanlier/JSFX
Geraint Luff https://github.com/geraintluff/jsfx
tilr JSFX: https://github.com/tiagolr/tilr_jsfx
Mawi JSFX: https://github.com/mawi-design/JSFX
Justin Johnson: https://github.com/Justin-Johnson/ReJJ
Tukan Studios: https://github.com/TukanStudios/TUKAN_STUDIOS_PLUGINS
Jozmac: https://github.com/jozmac/reapack-jm
JClones: https://github.com/JClones/JSFXClones
Sonic Anomaly: https://github.com/Sonic-Anomaly/Sonic-Anomaly-JSFX

Especially the Saike plugins and the tilr are really good, the others probably also worth some play. Some are cheesy or subpar, like simple DSP, but others are good and bring some stuff that Renoise does not provide, like synthesis, different FM filters, physical modelling, FM etc. Only downside is, the system uses quite some CPU power - the code has only little optimizations it seems. Still it may be interesting to find new sounds, and you can resample them in renoise just fine for sample genration. You can easily hack these plugins to adapt them (if you know how hehe!), or even you can explore some DSP programming on the fly like with Protoplug can do with LUA. And after all it’s for free…!

If you can make a walkthrough to get it compiled and running for free on windows, please comment below! Have fun playing around with the JsusFx Y’all †…

2 Likes
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Good idea and good effort. There is a lot of little jems hiding in the massive JSFX folder in Reaper and the community make some great stuff. Im not sure I’m savvy enough (in fact, I am definitely not) to get this going in Windows. Hope you get it set up how you want it to be. Love seeing this stuff.

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Thanks for this! The official ReaJS plugin only supports Windows so this is really useful to me as a Mac user as well.

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Glad you all like this. Does the ReaJS in Windows also generally lauch the JSFX models from community properly, i.e. Saike’s plugins? Then no need to build ysfx for windows, anyways, unless you want to hack it.

I’m also really baffled by the quality of effects, just the performance is suboptimal. Some stuff is real good, I wonder why it isn’t propagated more. Some is unique, i.e. the reapack-jm analyzers, like you can really analyze the heck out of your sounds in any way that is meaningful for music production.

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I remember using some of Saike’s stuff when I used Reaper so yeah I think so.

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Great, good to know!

(Edit in first post: changed build mode to “Release”, is much more performant than “MinSizeRel”. Sorry, my bad, I mixed them up)