SM Pro Audio has released a public beta of VFX Mac, offering built-in support for VST plug‐ins originally intended for use on the Windows operating system.

The VFX Application for Mac leverages some of the benefits of Wine to enable support for Windows VST plug‐in files. Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

Our application development team has built a Mac OSX compliant application that accesses a Virtual Machine (using elements of Wine) to facilitate the installation and running of Windows VST Plug‐ins.

Make sure to check the manual addendum for details on differences between the Mac beta and the PC release, in addition to known limitations.