Re: [linux-audio-dev] Problem with XML for LADSPA GUI?

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Problem with XML for LADSPA GUI?
From: Paul Barton-Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Fri May 26 2000 - 17:59:15 EEST


In message <01BFC6F6.4C61DE40_AT_bartman.plc.psion.com>you write:
>Thanks for the info.
>
>In this case, and as a musician, I have no interest in an XML-based LADSPA
>GUI. As a Linux enthusiast it's a useful marketing tool, but we've
>successfully stripped the potential API of most of its real musical
>usefulness.
>
>I've just flicked through the Sound Forge menus to find out how many
>component GUI's we could not render using XML (as I understand it). This is
>a rather old version of Sound Forge so things are probably worse now. Linux
>would *not* be able to provide the following GUIs:

   [ ... etc. ... ]

I think that this is a serious objection to the XML-only model. However:

>This is about a quarter of the items present and includes many of the
>useful ones. This means that we end up with a GUI that is vastly inferior
>to Windows. Possibly pretty, maybe even sexy, but basically useless.

I don't think anyone has suggested XML-only. The idea is that plugins
that don't need custom widgets can use XML. According to your brief
survey, thats about 75% of them. This fits in with my survey of the
ProTools partners catalog of TDM plugins. The other 25% can use the
toolkit of their choice. Ideally, they would use ladspaGUI (something
like vstGUI written for 1 or more Linux toolkits; alternatively, this
could be one of the existing wrapper-widget-sets like wxWin, and then
we don't have to write very much code at all!), so that they would be
independent of toolkit-choice issues. If even that is not good enough,
they can pick 1 or more toolkits and hope that a host supports it.

To me, this sounds *better* than Windows/MacOS: the 75% of cases can
get by without writing any code for their GUI at all; the rest can do
whatever they need to, with the proviso that this ain't Windows/MacOS,
and so we can't guarantee that any particular host on any particular
system can support their decision.

However, if their decision is "sensible" (ladspaGUI, GTK+, Qt), then
it will almost certainly work out for most people. And before somebody
leaps in with "what happens in I don't run X11 or any other window
system?", I would point out that the 25% of cases we're discussing are
highly-visual plugins that *require* a GUI in order to be
useful. Unless their authors do something very clever, they are not
useful in a GUI-less environment.

IMPORTANT:
**********
Which reminds me: just *how* does LADSPA support any of the list of
plugins that Richard mentioned ? How does anything specify the curve
of a paragraphic EQ to a LADSPA plugin ? Or the transfer function of a
dynamics processor ?

--p


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