I was desperately hanging on to this one plugin - MidiLooper from the ancient (2009) Insert Piz Here bundle by Reuben Vinal, because it was the only thing I had found to serve as looped MIDI input to a drum sampler (Battery 4) for effectively making a software drum machine to serve my needs (description here: Looping a Media Player synched to Slave / Musical - #3 by ClintGoss).
I did locate the Topiary Beatz plugin, but I did encounter a show-stopper bug (reported on GitHub).
I then found the MidiLooper plugin and a GitHub repo with the ancient source code revived and ported to VST3 and the latest JUCE by Simon Leiner (sleiner on GitHub, from Karlsruhe, Germany). Thinking I could “just” git clone the code into Visual Studio and “just” add more VST parameters
… and also fix the crashes
… and the font issues
… and the failure to track the Cantabile timeline
… or respond to Start / Stop / Continue messages,
I blew 14 hours just trying to get the entire thing to compile. Arrrrgh!
Then I found Stochas.
Big win. Free, Open source, maintained, actively used, and ticks all the boxes (with the exception of Drag and Drop from external MIDI files, but there is a way around this).
So while the idea of “reaching out and clicking a button” might have worked for me in a pinch for a big software project 20 years ago, it’s a bad idea today …
Also, it was interesting how the NOISE generated by off-target (for my needs) commercial products SHOUTING at you whenever you do a search drowned out the ideally-suited open-source offering. I only stumbled on Stochas in a random comment on an unrelated discussion forum …
Thanks for the assistance!!