Disposable Soft Synth Interface (DSSI, pronounced "dizzy") is a proposal for a plugin API for software instruments (soft synths) with user interfaces, permitting them to be hosted in-process by audio applications. Think of it as LADSPA-for-instruments, or something comparable to a simpler version of VSTi. It's intended to be simple, easy to write plugins for, GUI-toolkit-agnostic, and slightly biased towards familiarity with MIDI, and is proposed as an interim measure until bigger and better things come along: hence "disposable".
The proposal consists of an RFC, which describes the background and defines part of the proposed standard, plus a documented header file (dssi.h) which defines the remainder. The distribution also contains a handful of public-domain example files including an almost complete (but not pretty) host implementation and a simple synth plugin with a GUI. The API itself is licensed under the LGPL. The full RFC may be read here: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/RFC.txt The header file is here: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/dssi.h.txt The 0.1 distribution containing RFC, header and examples may be downloaded from SourceForge: see http://dssi.sourceforge.net/ and http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=104230 . This proposal was constructed by Steve Harris and Chris Cannam. Comments to LAD please! (Steve will be at ZKM, as those of you who've seen the schedule thingy will know; I can't make it there myself, so I'd quite like to see some feedback here.) Chris
