Re: [linux-audio-dev] saving plugin settings

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] saving plugin settings
From: Paul Winkler (slinkp23_AT_yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 18 2001 - 18:27:13 EEST


On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 09:37:18PM -0400, Taybin Rutkin wrote:
 
> I didn't specify this enough. The way it works in Ardour is that within
> presets/ you use the ladspa_id to create the directory. So it would be
> presets/1123/ for example. The different presets are seperated by being
> held in different files. I was using the filename as the preset's name.
> I'd add and trim the ".xml" behind the user's back. This method is nice
> because if they reuse a preset name, it automatically overwrites the old
> one (maybe a warning dialog would be a good idea).

OK, that's definitely simpler to implement, and avoids the host having
to scan through every preset file to see what's in them. There's only
two arguments I can think of in favor of this particular redundancy:

1) It helps facilitate the convenient exchange of presets. If I find
a web page with a preset for Bob's Fractal Flanger that I want to
download, I need to know the plugin ID in order to know where to put
it (at least under your directory naming scheme), and it's convenient
to be able to see that at the beginning of the plain-text preset.

2) It's not hard to accidentally move or rename a file and if you
don't catch the mistake right away, it's no fun trying to guess how to
put it back together. A clue inside the file is sometimes very very
valuable. For example, I recently lived through very bad filesystem
corruption on a machine that I hadn't backed up in two weeks,
resulting (after much blood, sweat, and fscking) in literally
thousands of randomly renamed files that I had to grep through looking
for important stuff. It took two days and it was worth it to avoid
re-doing two weeks' worth of work. Obviously I should have backed up
more often, but linux tends to make me complacent in that... it's the
only corrupted filesystem I've seen since I started running linux 4
years ago.

Counterarguments:

1) It's annoying to have to type redundant information.

Others?

> > additional element of the xml data, or we could just expect different
> > presets to be saved to different files. I suspect it might be useful
> > to be able to store a collection of presets in one file.
 
> I like this idea a little better. The file would be named ladspa_id.xml
> and would live in presets/ directly. The only problem would be having to
> handle duplicate names.

Yeah, on further reflection I don't think it would work. I understand
that it's very helpful to be able to get the ladspa id from *some*
part of the path, whether it's the basename or the parent directory,
and that just doesn't mesh well with a variable number of presets in
each file. I think it should be either one file per plugin or one file
per preset. I can't think of any significant advantages to the former,
and the latter would be a lot easier for hosts to handle.

-- 
................    paul winkler   ................
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