Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ladspa plugin GUI proposal
From: Benno Senoner (sbenno_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Fri May 26 2000 - 00:03:01 EEST
On Thu, 25 May 2000, David Benson wrote:
> Many other questions have been raised:
>
> - how can a plugin-made gui coexist with
> the host's gui?
by running in it's own thread
I repeat: no per-plugin thread, but a
per-toolkit thread.
That means 20 gtk plugins, 10 Qt plugins , 8 Motif plugins
= 3 running GUI threads which communicate with
the host thread using IPC
>
> - should be gui and dsp parts of the plugins be separated?
> (eg must they be in the same address space?)
> should they be optionally separated?
Right now if you care about the pure-DSP folks,
the best thing to do is to keep the two in separated .so
files. The runtime overhead as said before is zero or close
to zero. (the only drawback is we have more .so files, around,
but the advantage is that we can provide 10 different GUIs for
each DSP plugin and the user can even choose which one to load.
I can already hear Paul saying:
"keep it simple, stupid" <-- notice the added comma :-)))
>
> - should the standard define an API,
> or an XML or other data standard with rough
> implementations for various guis?
> both?
yes to XML and this should be the default !
(make features similar to VSTGui available to the XML GUI, if this is
possible)
the above gui-threads hack is only for plugins wanting a 3D ball jumping
around while the music is playing , because this feature can't be implemented
with XML / VstGUI etc.
> (i'd advocate this separation on other grounds anyway)
I am glad that I am not alone ! :-)
>
> - xml-defined gui with possible plugin override.
>
> This would be good: it would mostly boil down to a DTD.
>
> Comments?
I think a cool webtool would be a site which allows us to poll for questions
like this. (where everyone of us can only vote once , with some mechanism
(confirmation mail) to prevent sabotage).
That way withing 1-2 days we would have a quite nice picture of what the
linux-audio-devers are thinking.
:-)
Benno.
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