Re: [LAD] minimal LV2

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:46:40AM +1000, Geoff Beasley wrote:

> Hey Fons, does all this discussion mean you're thinking about
> whipping up a few plugs then?? (please please please..)

There's a number of them in more or less finished state
and being tested here and there in the form of standalone
Jack apps. You can see one of them (a 'Neve style' EQ, in
standalone form) here:
<http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/eq1.png>.

There are also two dynamics processors, and improved
'autotune', a reverb and some others.

If I would release them, the first thing that would happen
is that the very same people who in the past have refused to
accept everything I'd had to say about plugins, and accused
me of spreading FUD and being elitist etc. etc. would be the
first one to have no moral objections at all to rip out the
DSP code made by someone they despise, and turn these plugins
into LV2s.

Since IMNSHO the quality of these plugins resides not only in
the DSP code but in other aspects as well, that would mean that
a lot of my effort would just be wasted, and I'm not looking
forward to see that happen. There is currently no LV2 host that
even comes close to being able to accept these plugins in their
original full-featured form.

So I'm designing a dedicated framework around them, with the
following features:

- All plugins have a dedicated GUI, defined up to the last
pixel by the plugin author. There are no 'autogenerated'
GUIs.

- The GUI parts are displayed in 'rack' form in a separate
process. So you don't have a zillion plugin windows cluttering
your desktop. In principle there's one such rack window per
host, but it could be shared as well, or a host could have
more than one. If the host's GUI toolset has the right hooks
and is capable of providing the right information (all of it
just raw X11 data), the host could quite easily 'embed' the rack.
With a bit more effort it could even embed individual plugins.

- The communication between the DSP plugin (running in the host
process) and the GUI plugin (running in the rack application)
is strictly private to these two, even if technically it passes
via the host. A separate API gives the host access to parameters
in a controlled way.

- Multichannel support is provided by the plugins themselves.
The host is not supposed to 'clone' a single-channel one for
multichannel use.

Ciao,

-- 
FA
O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
E guerra e morte !
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