[LAU] LV2 - "Are we nearly there yet?"

2011 is very nearly over - I was kinda hoping Ardour 3 would have had
a stable release by now which obviously hasn't happened but at least
it has made huge leaps in stability and functionality this year; I
wasn't hedging my bets on it being done by now to be honest but
congrats to all involved for their continued hard work anyway! Apart
from A3 going beta, other notable FLOSS audio highlights for me this
year have been the release of OpenOctave MIDI which would seem to have
forked MuSE to very rapidly become the most professional FLOSS MIDI
sequencer and TYOQA actually happened! Whoop! Things are really
starting to heat up in the FLOSS DAW world and we have a few real good
choices now!

This year also saw a stable JACK release complete with JACK session
support and Nedko has just released v1 of LADISH - both of these
technologies are much needed for having a nice workflow when using
multiple standalone JACK apps to create music but I hope that in 2012
JACK session managers such as these will become a largely unrequired,
legacy aspect of Linux audio because instead we will hopefully have a
good selection of LV2 plugins to do what currently requires standalone
JACK apps. There will no doubt continue to be valid uses for LADISH
and JS in a post-LV2 world but such session managers add yet another
layer of complexity to creating music with free software, raising both
the learning curve and resource requirements and it is yet another
aspect of Linux audio that is likely to scare off potential converts
from other platforms and frankly puts me off using and advocating it
too.

When I discovered that falktx was working on porting his fantastic
DISTRHO plugin repo to LV2 I was overjoyed. The Highlife sampler is
still missing from DISTRHO but once I can load quality, useful LV2
plugins such as NoiseMaker and Highlife and have them work as you'd
expect VSTi's or AU instruments to then I will truly think Linux Audio
has arrived and will be ready to be adopted beyond the hardcore
trailblazers and devs already present on this list. It should then be
possible to create all free software Linux audio distros that will
finally be able to offer most of the functionality and a comparable
workflow to that enjoyed by Windows and OSX users for so long now -
hallefookinlujah! :)

So, poor falktx has been continually bugged by me since I found out
his plans- turns out he has been prevented from completing his plugin
ports due to a couple of missing and/or incomplete LV2 extensions that
are required for such plugins to function- namely the X11 UI
extension, most importantly, needs finalising and also another
extension is needed to handle VST-style programs/presets. I realise I
could've just mailed drobilla directly to find out where he's up to
with this but I've just explained why I think this is of the utmost
importance to the Linux Audio community so I thought I'd ask him
publicly so we all know where we're up to. Drobilla?

Happy Christmas Linux Audio land!
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Received on Tue Dec 20 12:15:03 2011