On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 10:53:58AM +0100, Steve Harris wrote: > Almost two years ago at the LA conference a bunch of us agreed that > something need to be done to improve LADSPA, and on the approximate > direction it should take.
I'm not competent to comment on header files or implementation details. But via Om, I'm a LADSPA power user and would like to bring up some issues ;) Distribution / finding plugins: I would like to have an app, where I can put checkmarks to all plugins and they will be fetched and installed (buidling from source / binaries as option). But just a way to get from the host not finding a plugin to the name of the collection it's in would be nice already (so an app like Om can not only say plugin-x not found, but also point to the package). Stability: There are some plugins that will die if fed with values out of their range (and this happens easily in a modular system). Maybe some mechanism to protect against this could be build into the framework? Control/audio rate: Having several variations of the same plugin to allow varying audio/ control rate port setups makes for unnecessary long plugin lists and requires the user to delete and insert a different one, should he find out some port should be audio, not control rate. Just look at the sine oscillator(s) ... The rate of a port should be switchable (at leat in all cases where we have both versions now). Port grouping: Hosts should be able to see, wether 2 ports are independent, or happen to be a stereo pair (or any multi-channel setup). Also a way to specify that things like frequency and amount ports of an EQ form pairs might be nice. Should be helpful for generative plugin GUIs. Port Roles: Ports could have roles assigned to them, like signal_input, sidechain, latency or bpm (the last for transport awareness and to make it possible hosts assign values to it automaticaly). Referencing: There needs to be a safe way to reference plugins and their ports. Portnames make for human readable patch files, but this doesn't work with i18n, when Attack becomes Einschwingzeit ;) Hints: Maybe I just didn't see it, but shouldn't there be a hint for lists? Like for plugins that have modes/presets? Presets: Cross-host preset loading/saving. Help / Discription: A way to bring up a short discription of a plugin and what the ports are about. MIDI/OSC Don't know if the new LADSPAs should be able to handle MIDI/OSC, but there should be plugins that do it ;) GUI lib: There could be 1 or 2 (GTK, QT) libs for generative plugin GUIs, for hosts not having to reinvent the wheel and for consistency. --- Thorsten Wilms