[LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 14.01.2011 11:08, schrieb allcoms:
> 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 it would be wise, to throw everything on LV2 and to abandon DSSI 
and LADSPA in the long run. And to make that clear to everyone out there 
who thinks about getting into plugin-programming for Linux.

LV2 has matured a lot and it has get a lot of new great plugins that 
show its powers in the last year. Think of CALF, LinuxDSP or, just 
recently IR.

There is still a lot to be done but see, what a normal user can actually 
do today with LV2 -- this is exactly, what people are asking for if they 
complain the lack of plugins on Linux.


> 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

No suprise. While DSSI is quite nice, it did not do well in the real 
world while LV2 has some quite impressing case-studies to offer. If you 
think about porting to a native format, you will have a look upon 
solutions made in that format.
So look upon the Invada or CALF plugins in LV2 and compare it with 
WhysynthDSSI or other DSSI-plugins.
Of course, the CALF-plugins work more or less the same as great as 
DSSI-variants. But this only proves, that there seem to be no 
shortcomings in LV2 since it can do the same at least and is newer...

> 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 :/
>
>
>
>
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