Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ardour, LADSPA, a marriage
From: Tommi Ilmonen (tilmonen_AT_alpha.hut.fi)
Date: Wed Nov 15 2000 - 15:30:22 EET
Hi.
On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> >The reason I asked is because, while many open projects rally around a
> >single program, lad looks to me like a collection of individuals
> >developing and sharing their personal knowledge base regarding digital
> >audio through the process of developing their own apps. Ardour clearly
> >has the potential to unify the efforts of developers aiming for a
> >complete linux daw.
>
> I hope so. I try to always be open to the ideas and contributions of
> others. As yet, however, Kai is the only other person operating in
> this universe, and his goals and design space are pretty different
> from mine. There's been lots of discussions of things that probably
> *should* be a part of Ardour, but very little or no code. Thats OK
> - I'll just keep waking up bleary-eyed but razzed with excitement.
The work I have done with Mustajuuri has a bit different basic philosophy.
The role of a plugin is rather different from VST/ProTools -approach.
I think there should not be "an application", but plugins that can be
chained together. For example in Mustajuuri the mixer is not an
application by itself, but a plugin that can be used to host other
plugins. In future there may be other big plugins (like a decent hdr),
but the basic idea is to get away from the ProTools/whatever
"this is my application and there are its plugins" -kind of thinking. The
idea was sort of borrowed from SoniFlow (to credit the originators).
Now, if Ardour was a plugin like the mixer we could connect them together
at this second. The mixer is far from perfect (buggy, no automation), but
at least one could do basic mixing.
Now, this is not going to happen any time soon. The most probable path to
such integration would be that both Mustajuuri-mixer and Ardour-hdr would
be Ladspa plugins. I fear Ladspa does not support this kind of big
plugins; plugins with their own support files, file formats and GUIs.
To be honest I think the way analog mixers work is not the way to go about
digital/GUI/mouse mixing, but I have not had the time to come up with a
better idea. Should look at other systems, but most seem rather awful -
not quite as bad as ProTools, but way too tied to the analog world.
> Ardour really doesn't have to care about the EDL file format. Thats
> the easy part (especially when people like timevista supply a
> bison/flex parser for you :). The hard part is actually implementing
> what the EDL describes. I have, oh, 80% of that in place, but as yet,
This is another reason to not make applications so very stand-alone. If
there is a strange file format there should be a plugin that is the source
of the format and the plugin should be able to automatically handle the
files - no need to parse information generated by other apps.
--Now that I have talked about modularity I must confess people often hype the idea. Modularity tends to be bad for usability. Holistic (or monolithic) design gives the possibility to integrate all features to a coherent packet. Or rather, modular systems *tend* to be difficult to use.
Tommi Ilmonen Researcher >=> http://www.hut.fi/u/tilmonen/ Linux/IRIX audio: Mustajuuri >=> http://www.tml.hut.fi/~tilmonen/mustajuuri/ 3D audio/animation: DIVA >=> http://www.tml.hut.fi/Research/DIVA/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Nov 15 2000 - 16:16:16 EET