Skip to content

Versions

There are many different versions associated with the MetaModule, VCV Rack, and third-party plugins. This guide attempts to explain the different version you may encounter.

Firmware Version

  • The Firmware is the code that runs on the MetaModule hardware.

    You can see the firwmare version by clicking the Settings button in the Main Menu.

    The firmware version is displayed next to the words "Firmware version: ".

    For example, the firmware version in the picture is v1.2.1.

    You can check the latest firmware version available from the Downloads page

Settings

Plugin Version

  • Each plugin that runs on the MetaModule can have its own version.

    You can see the plugin version by looking at the file you downloaded, the version will be at the end of the file name.

    You can also see the version of what's loaded on the MetaModule by going to the Settings > Plugins page and looking at the version next to each plugin name.

    Note that the VCV Rack plugins have their own versioning system. The version you see here is the MetaModule plugin version. You can check which VCV Rack plugin version the MetaModule version is based off of, by looking at the Plugins webpage.

Plugin page

Compatibility between Firmware version and Plugin version

In general if you use the latest version of all plugins work and the latest version of firmware, then everything will run.

But, in the future there may be more firmware and plugin versions, so there are some rules for determining compatibility.

Version Major, Minor, and Patch

Versions have three parts: major, minor, and patch.

For example, v1.2.3 has a major version of 1, a minor version of 2, and a patch version of 3.

We follow semantic versioning to determine compatibility.

For a plugin to run on a particular firmware version:

  • The major versions must be the same

    • Example: plugin v2.x.x will run on firmware v2.x.x, but not on firmware v3.x.x or 1.x.x

  • The minor version of the plugin must be equal or less than the firmware.

    • Example: plugin v1.2.x will run on firmware v1.3.x or v1.2.x, but will not run on firmware v1.1.x

  • The patch version doesn't matter:

    • Example: plugin v1.2.5 will run on firmware v1.2.1 or v1.2.9

4ms VCV Rack Plugin version

  • The VCV Rack plugin of 4ms modules also has a version. This is separate from the version of the firmware of either the firmware or plugins.

    You can see the version of the 4ms plugin for VCV Rack by right-clicking any 4ms module and looking in the Info sub-menu.

    This version number does not correspond to the firmware version or plugin versions or API version. The major version indicates the major version of VCV Rack that it will run on (Rack v2) and the minor and patch versions indicate revisions and bug fixes to the plugin.

    Always use the latest version of the 4ms plugin for VCV Rack. In terms of compatibility, it will always generate patches that run on all firmware versions (though, of course not all features may be available for earlier versions).

VCV Rack Plugin version

Technical details on Plugin versions (for developers)

This section is meant for plugin developers or anyone curious how versioning works with plugins. Nothing in this section is necessary to know or understand in order to use the MetaModule and plugins.

Plugins have their version in three places. While this is overly redundant, it offers some boosts in performance for the plugin loader.

  1. The filename contains a version string: supermodules-v1.2.3.mmplugin. This MUST be in the form -vX.X.X where X is a series of digits 0-9.
  2. Inside the .mmplugin tar bundle, there is a file called SDK-X.X which is automatically generated by the plugin.cmake build script.
  3. In the metamodule-core-interface library that the plugin compiles against, there is a function get_version()

Since un-tarring all .mmplugin files found on the disk consumes a lot of time and memory, the version is embedded into the filename so that the plugin loader GUI can quickly display all found plugin files.

The SDK-X.X file is present so that the plugin loader can abort early if it untars a file with an incompatible version. This file provides a small amount of assurance that executing the code in the plugin will not crash.

The get_version() symbol is called only after the the first two checks have passed. This returns a major, minor, and revision.