[linux-audio-dev] do YOU support LASDPA? (was Re: Linux Audio plugin API's: where are we ?)

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Subject: [linux-audio-dev] do YOU support LASDPA? (was Re: Linux Audio plugin API's: where are we ?)
From: Kai Vehmanen (kaiv_AT_wakkanet.fi)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 18:40:20 EEST


Please read on... important question coming up! :)

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Richard Guenther wrote:

>> (b) write multiple specialized APIs, or (c) a compromise API (=LADSPA).
> too - so the point of having LADSPA is to write plugins that run
> (inferior) on all hosts? This doesnt sound that interesting, though.

Well, not exactly. IMHO the only real point is whether people will
write plugins. If there are hundreds of good plugins available, we
are all going to be interested. All other issues are secondary, because...

        - if the API isn't technically good and flexible enough,
          developers won't accept it (=start ot use it)
        - it the API is too complex, nobody will write plugins
        - if we don't come up with something concrete, some other -
          possibly a very badly designed API - will become the
          standard (=what people use)

I know there a few hundred people reading this. Now I'd really
like to hear from as many of you as possible: are you interested
in adding LADSPA hosting to your app and/or write LADSPA plugins?
If not, please tell us why. If the API is not good enough, what's
the biggest problem? ...

        - static type for control and audio data, currently a 32bit float
        - not enough support for multichannel streams (interleaving, etc)
        - no support for allocating memory using the plugin API /
          bounded instantation time problem
        - no support for events / sample-accurate control
        - data ranges - currently both control data and audio data
          are not normalized to any specific range

If you have no objections, then please, add LADSPA support to your apps...
It's the only way we can get this started. If it turns out, that nobody is
interested, then we just have to improve the design or spend our time
doing something else.

As for myself, all my apps already support LADSPA (through libecasound
library). I've even coded a simple generic GUI (see ecawave's
CVS-version). For my uses, the current API is enough.

And as a last note, no, I don't think we should stop development.
I'm all for developing MuCos/LASDSPA-v2 with support for events,
multiple data types, VST, etc ... but this shouldn't prevent us from
writing LASDAPA-v1 code. For many cases, the current API is enough.

-- 
Kai Vehmanen <k_AT_eca.cx> ---------------- CS, University of Turku .
 . audio software for linux ...	http://www.eca.cx 		 .
 . armchair-tunes mp3/wav/ra .. http://www.wakkanet.fi/sculpcave .


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