Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] Experience of Linux sound apps, was: Introduction
From: Robert Jonsson (robert.jonsson_AT_dataductus.se)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 09:49:38 EET
Steve Harris wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 10:21:00 -0600, Jeremiah Benham wrote:
>
>>>Personally I've got a pet project trying to provide the glue to run
>>>Windows-VST plugins in a Linux environment by using Wine. I would
>>>
>>What do you need VST plugins for?
>>
>
> Well, there are a lot of them, and some are very good.
Yes... and VST also supports softsynths, some which are extremely good.
>
> I would have thought that it might be better to go for the same approach
> that xine uses to play video via. windows media codecs though, that way
> you don't need wine. I thin it works by unrolling the (simple) windows
> loadable object format, which I imagine VST uses too. VST plugins for IRIX
> are .so files I think.
I guess you are talking about the avifile project, and a bunch of siblings... I
think it actually is branched from Wine a long time ago.
Main reason why I don't think that it will be possible is laziness ;-).
Avifile supports dynamically loading of DLLs, which is mainly what is needed.
But the plugin probably requires some Windows APIs to function properly.
VST plugins have their own graphics library which makes things easier, but this
library interfaces with Windows somewhere. As noted by Paul Davis earlier it's
probably possible to rewrite the vst-graphics-library to use native Linux APIs,
but I'm not the one to do it. Also, I've come to realize the plugins tend to
"cheat" quite oftenly. using other windows APIs as they see fit, msgboxes or
whatever.
I've tested with Wine, it works just fine. Getting avifile to work with this
approach is a lot harder.
>
> What we really need are more people coding GPL'd LADSPA plugins and LCP
> guis though. VST plugins are all very well, but hardly any of them are
> Free, and they don't lend themsolves to being used on the command line,
> which we like doing for some reason ;)
>
Creating more LADSPA plugins has always been a goal of mine also :-)
but...honestly I don't see myself producing any HQ reverbs any time soon...
perhaps some wacky distortion effects... some other millenia...
/Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Tue Jan 15 2002 - 09:40:22 EET