this is on the radar, what you are asking for is similar to lv2apply I guess

you can already run guile scripts via the command line so you could run a few plugins and process audio if you wanted to assuming all the necessary API is exposed but I haven't really tried that yet

for now, I recommend kuriborosu as well https://github.com/falkTX/kuriborosu/

Thanks, very cool!

I'll check out kuriborsu!

What is "a file" in this case? Because VST don't have idea what that is, so you're still going to be generating your projects in _something_

That said, what you're describing sounds pretty close to using cantabile in headless mode (https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/guides/commandLineOptions), where you just create a project with your desired VST chain, and then take it from there.

But don't VST's have settings? mrswatson can feed them fxp settings files so I assume its a standard. mrswatson just only seems to work with older or simpler vsts.

I'll check that out cantabile headless thanks!

If you don't mind a little bit of high level programming, I would recommend SuperCollider in NRT mode + the VSTPlugin extension or Pure Data in batch mode + the [vstplugin~] external. In both cases you'd generate the OSC command file resp. write the Pd patch once and then invoke it from the command line with any soundfile you want.

Maybe you can cook something quickly with Spotify's Pedalboard: https://github.com/spotify/pedalboard

My first thought was to see if ffmpeg could do this. Unfortunately it seems like not currently [0] but what caught my eye is a mention that "the VST SDK has a linux command line VST Host you can compile" which might be all you need.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/1661505/naive-query-vst-plug...

Check out https://github.com/falkTX/kuriborosu

Check out https://github.com/fedden/RenderMan and https://github.com/DBraun/DawDreamer

thanks, I'll check these out!

have you seen the pedalboard project? Might get you the outcome you're after if you want to dabble in python.

https://github.com/spotify/pedalboard

Look at gstreamer.