Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] emagic (logic) drops VST support under OS X
From: Steve Harris (S.W.Harris_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 20:24:42 EEST
On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 06:22:33 +0200, Tim Goetze wrote:
> i believe that with patience and prudence 'lad' may be capable of
> producing an interface definition capable of connecting all our
> audio/MIDI apps and libraries in style, without deriving from CA
> or VST.
I agree. Entirely. But I have some nagging doubts about this process
1) its very slow. everyone wants to put thier oar in (including me ;) and
there are always people who have subtly different ideas about what the
goals are. Thinking back to the LADSPA 1.1 and jack discussions.
2) I think we could miss out on an oportunity to be compatible with
something or other.
OTOH, rolling our own plugin system gives some benefits:
1) we can bias it towards our usage, eg. command line friendliness.
LADSPA, owing to its use of meaningful port values is pretty commandline
friendly.
2) no licencing problems.
Something that needs to be address in any LADPA format is the GUI issue.
X really complicates this. You have to select one toolkit for inprocess
plugins, and for practical and pollitical reasons its basicly impossible
to pick Qt or GTK (...etc.). So, we need to agree on a plugin UI toolkit,
it has somehow to be compatible with hosts toolkits and it has to be easy
to write plugin guis in. Fun.
This is something I'd hoped we might be able to get from AU's, as at least
it would settle a lot of arguments about API style etc. Then we could get
down to the (admittedly hard) process of supporting the API in peoples
favourite toolkits.
- Steve
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