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
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
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.
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
