Prerequisites

This guide assumes that a development environment with all required dependencies has been set-up. Check the “hacking on score” guide for more information on how to do that.

Choosing the plug-in API to use

ossia score provides two plug-in APIs:

Fx API

A simple API that can be used to implement quick audio / midi / control effects and generators in a single file.

Processes implemented with that API are available at the following address.

To create a new plug-in, simply duplicate one of the files, change the metadata (name, UUID, etc. to differentiate it from other score plug-ins), and add it to the list in this file.

When building score again, the plug-in should appear in the process list.

A video explains the whole process:

Score API

A more advanced API that allows to customize pretty much every aspect of the software, but requires more work.

The major part of the software is built with that API: every process in score comes from plug-ins. These plug-ins are located in the score git repository.

The addon tutorial is an example of usage of the score API to showcase its capabilities. It is documented here.

To develop new plug-ins that way, we provide a set of Github templates. Simply create a repository from the template, and follow the steps in the README.

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