[linux-audio-dev] Plugin APIs (again)

David Olofson david at olofson.net
Thu Dec 5 10:16:00 UTC 2002


On Thursday 05 December 2002 11.15, Steve Harris wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 08:43:11 -0800, Tim Hockin wrote:
> > So how do VST effects do it?  I can increase the delay feedback
> > all I like and it doesn't hiccup, stutter, or misbehave at all. 
> > You're saying that this is a non-rt control because it might have
> > to realloc() buffers?
>
> Delay feedback is a RT control, delay time might not be (depending
> on how its implemented).

Right - I didn't even notice that he wrote "feedback" and not "delay 
time"... *heh* That's what I was thinking about, to clarify things.


> I'm not sure how this can be handled easily, there are lots of
> things like loading samples that will be impossible to handle in an
> RT way, but I'm not sure that something like a sampler belongs in
> this kind of API. I know there are VSTi samplers, but windows
> people dont have jack.

Well, they have ReWire, but AFAIK, that supports only the "load as 
DLL and run as callback" method...


> I could be that everything that can be usfully implemented in this
> kind of API doesnt need non RT controls.

I strongly doubt it's as simple as that. Maybe those controls will 
really be more like "instantiation time parameters" - but they still 
need to be *somewhere*. An extra bit in an existing API seems like 
less complexity than a parallel API with essentially the same 
functionality.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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