Re: [LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

rosea.grammostola wrote:
> On 01/14/2011 11:08 AM, allcoms wrote:
>> Hi list,
>>
>> I suppose I could've just addressed this to drobilla and got most of
>> my questions answered but it concerns us all really as even if A3 and
>> qtractor were to achieve feature parity with Cubase and buds tomorrow
>> (obviously I'm stretching things a bit there) we still wouldn't see
>> vast droves switching to Linux DAWs for a few reasons such as hardware
>> support, people liking what they know etc. but most importantly the
>> dearth of quality native plugins available for Linux seems to be a
>> primary showstopper for most.
>>
>> DSSI has a few things coded for it but not much and its still very
>> early days for LV2 so the open plugin format of the future is still
>> anyones game and it may not necessarily be either of those that
>> succeeds and gets widely used of course. I think a couple of VSTs have
>> been ported over to LV2 but I'm not aware of any that have been ported
>> to DSSI and I think that the ease in doing so is quite an important
>> factor in the success of any such format, if not the be-all and
>> end-all. If anyone here has any experience with coding and/or porting
>> VSTis - what is currently lacking from LV2 or DSSI that could
>> potentially cause problems for someone wanting to port their big beefy
>> synth or snazzy FX from VSTi to LV2 or DSSI? I already know about the
>> incomplete persist LV2 extension but I'm pretty sure that won't be the
>> only thing needing work.
>>
>> A very important factor for such a format would definitely be that the
>> major hosts (commercial, foss or otherwise) for all major platforms
>> would be able to easily implement support for it and that plugins
>> would be easy to port between the different platforms. I'm not aware
>> of any DAWs for Windows that support LV2 or DSSI yet but I could be
>> wrong? There's nothing stopping a closed source, commecial app vendor
>> adding support for either format is there? Another factor I see as
>> increasingly important is that the plugin format should be able to
>> take advantage of OpenCL to take advantage of the superior processing
>> power of todays GPUs. Quite how we'd convince Steinberg and co. we
>> need a replacement for VSTi and get them to support an open standard
>> though is anyones guess :/
>
> This message comes at a time when I started to think, 'hey it seems that
> the LV2 plugin format is getting forward'. The Calf and Linuxdsp plugins
> show what is possible and also the concept of Composite looks promising
> and now the release of the IR LV2 plugin.
>
> Maybe this development is due to the fact that 'Drobilla' has cleaned up
> the documentation for LV2? Maybe Tom can tell...
>
> Nevertheless, minor point is that Renoise and Pianoteq for example,
> didn't choose the LV2 plugin for their software yet... This should make
> 'us' think about what is missing in the LV2 format at the moment. How
> can it made easier for developers (also on Windows and Mac probably) to
> adapt LV2?
>
> However, if the LAD community is able to show that you can make nice
> plugins with LV2, other (commercial) developers will follow more easy
> probably. I don't expect 'commercial' developers to pioneer with LV2.
>
> Regards,
> \r
>
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I think one of the reasons that (other) commercial developers might tend
to go for VST support on linux versions of their plugins might be that
it just kind of 'falls out' of developing using cross platform kits like
'JUCE'. IIRC last time I looked at coding with juce, it seemed that
building a version of a VST for linux was almost just a matter of
pressing another button on the compiler so to speak. So it's very
little extra effort for a developer who is mainly focused on other
platforms to add linux VST support. However adding support for another
plugin standard such as LV2 may require significant extra effort (for
example, for the linuxDSP plugins we coded up an entire UI 'engine' that
can be used for VST, LV2, JACK etc, since there were restrictions on
using other toolkits in commercial products and there were various
technical issues with using things like GTK in Qt hosts etc)

LV2 is much improved from its original incarnation, and the existing
documentation is perfectly adequate in my opinion - it requires a bit of
simple 'programming knowledge' to understand it, but realistically, if
you don't have that you won't get very far with developing any kind of
plugin anyway - and of course there are plenty of 'examples' out there.
  The most significant step has been adding support for external UIs
which enables us to provide a consistent GUI look and feel regardless of
the UI toolkit that the host uses.
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Received on Sat Jan 15 00:15:04 2011