Subject: Re: Plugin chains and EDLs, was Re: [linux-audio-dev] ardour, LADSPA, a marriage
From: Kai Vehmanen (kaiv_AT_wakkanet.fi)
Date: Tue Nov 14 2000 - 20:45:31 EET
On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
>>Not really. The bus is actually just a buffer where a bunch of
>>plugins have mixed down all of their output. Throw it at any plugin
> As long as LADSPA does not require the run_adding() method to be
> present, busses cannot be implemented in this way. This is another
> good reason for requiring that all plugins support this, IMHO. VST
As I've said before (sometime in 1999, when buses&stripes were last
discussed), we shouldn't go too far optimizing the plugin API for one
specific use-case. You can implement buses&stripes even without
run_adding, it's just question of optimizing. And this isn't a light
decision. Without _very_ good reasons, there's no sense in solving a
specific problem in all plugins (I assume number of plugins is way bigger
than number of hosts), when the problem can be solved in hosts.
And coming back to the buses&stripes discussion, they are handy
abstractions when designing a physical/hw user-interface for a big
mixer/daw, but they aren't necessarily needed when everything is done with
software. In ecasound, x inputs are mixed/routed into y chains, data in
chains is processed and then mixed to z outputs. I call this 2-stage
mixing. We can easily extend this to get 3-stage mixing (buses), by mixing
the y chains to separate t chains before the output-stage. This way you
can for instance add a common reverb to a set of tracks. But why stop
here, we could as well have n-stage mixing if we needed to. The point
is that it's easy.
-- . http://www.eca.cx ... [ audio software for linux ] /\ . . http://www.eca.cx/aivastus ... [ aivastus net radio ] /\ . . http://www.eca.cx/sculpscape [ my armchair-tunes mp3/ra/wav ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Tue Nov 14 2000 - 23:50:50 EET