I'd like to announce a new version (numbered 0.4) of the DSSI synth plugin API proposal.
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/ 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. DSSI 0.4 was constructed by Steve Harris, Chris Cannam, and Sean Bolton. DSSI is intended to be simple, especially for plugins; GUI-toolkit-agnostic; and slightly biased towards familiarity with MIDI. It's proposed as an interim measure until bigger and better things come along: hence "disposable". The 0.4 release addresses the problem of efficiently managing shared resources among instances of a plugin by providing explicit support for plugins that may be run in a group. It also clarifies issues such as thread-safety and fixes a few other problems with the 0.1 API identified on LAD and elsewhere. We think the 1.0 release could look pretty much the same as this 0.4 version, barring any more stupid mistakes. The release contains the RFC, the dssi.h header file, example host and plugin code, and now the all-important FluidSynth wrapper plugin. Comments to LAD please. Chris