michael noble wrote:
I'm coming late to the conversation here but I wanted to bring this
point up a while back, probably the last time this conversation took place.
When I was first getting started with computer based music and sound
production I used windows, and from recollection, one of the early
events that led to an explosion of interest in and creation for the VST
standard was the graphical tool Synthedit. It enabled non-programmers,
but people willing to experiment with dsp development, or even people
with dsp knowledge but wanting a faster tool chain, to develop complex
plugins, and also share libraries developed for synthedit to allow a
mixed community of amateur and professional developers to emerge.
Rapid application development tools such as synthedit are good and bad
in equal measure in my opinion. Having used synthedit as a means of
prototyping ideas for windows VSTs I can say it IS very useful, but the
problems with such tools can be:
1) The building block approach is good for prototyping, and easy to use
even for people with no dsp knowledge, however...
2) Blindly using the 'black box' approach to constructing complex DSP
processing can have its pitfalls if you don't have a grasp of (at least
the theory) of what is going on inside the boxes - for example in
synthedit you might wire up a bunch of filters (say to make a multiband
compressor) without a clue about the correct way to manage the phase
alignment of the filters with the result that your great new plugin
actually has huge deep notches in the frequency response when it should
sum back to flat (Note: this is also a problem with just re-using
plugins and libraries in other ways - my recent tests using JAMIN
suggest exactly this problem happens when using the IIR multiband)
3) Synthedit's ability to just churn out a finished .dll meant that
everyone could start making plugins without any programming knowledge
and superficially, out of the resulting thousands of free plugins, you
wouldn't know the good from the bad (although if you look in your
vst_plugins folder after / while using a synthedit plugin you will
normally find the tell-tale signs of it dumping its little .dat files
and modules out all over the place)
All of this is not to say that the tools should not be available to do
such things, but perhaps people need to be aware of the potential
problems, and to appreciate that although such tools make DSP seem easy,
it most definitely is NOT and requires a great amount of knowledge and
experience to do (and understand) properly (and even then its easy to
get caught out!)
I may be overstating its significance in the rise of windows audio
production. Nor am I saying that everything created with such a tool was
of a high standard - it clearly wasn't. I do think though that such a
tool may spur development in linux based plugins.
The curious thing is that such a tool exists, at least in early stages,
but no one here ever talks about it much, which I think is a shame. I'm
talking about CLAM network manager, which is a QT based graphical tool
for many things. It is similar in some ways to other graphical patching
environments like PD. ingen or even AMS (another vastly underrated tool
IMO). One feature that makes it pertinent to this discussion is that it
has been able to be used to build ladspa plugins for some time now, and
I believe the coming release allows building LV2 plugins with QT UI.
I've used it to build a rudimentary ladspa plugin and it just worked.
Certainly I think if more plugins are desired, it wouldn't hurt to
either try using CLAM, or get involved in its development to make it a
tool that could spur linux audio development in general.
-michael
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