SAVIHost

SAVIHost is a little derivate of VSTHost that has been crafted for the sole purpose of automatically loading exactly one VSTi. To do so, savihost.exe has to be copied or renamed to the name of the PlugIn's DLL. If, for example, the PlugIn is called blabla.dll, savihost.exe has to be renamed to blabla.exe. Here, for example, it's PPG Wave 2V.exe:

Note: in Windows XP, you can use the command
  fsutil hardlink create newname.exe existing.exe
to save space on your NTFS-formatted hard disk.

Starting with V1.07, I've added a built-in keyboard bar so that PlugIns that rely on external MIDI input can be tested at ease:

What's that good for?

Well - some people have expressed the desire to run their VSTis as standalone programs in as simple a way as possible. Using SAVIHost, it is a matter of seconds to create an executable for the plugin, which can then simply be invoked by the familiar double-click. No massive sequencer package, no unnecessary overhead.

Downloads

The following files are available for the current version:

Current version: 1.43 - VST 2.4rev2 / Module Architecture / 3.5 + ASIO 2.2 support,  separate .WAV Player/Recorder

H.G.Fortune has written a documentation that you can download here (.zip file, 290K). A bit outdated by now, but nice to have anyway. For features that are similar or identical to VSTHost's, please refer to the VSTHost documentation.

^* Note: SAVIHost is intended to be and stay a small executable, so it doesn't include the MSVC / MFC runtime library. The x86 version is still built with VC6, for the simple reason that msvcrt.dll / mfc42.dll are guaranteed to be on every version of Windows since Win98SE, and it doesn't need any more sophisticated features.

The x64 version, however, is built with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and thus requires msvcr90.dll and mfc90.dll to run. I'm not sure whether the 64-bit versions of Vista/7 contain these from the start; if not, please download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64).