[linux-audio-dev] XAP: a polemic

Tim Goetze tim at quitte.de
Sat Dec 14 13:49:00 UTC 2002


this is not meant to intimidate, rather to be a wake-up call.

it seems almost unreal (and certainly unprofessional) to me 
that an instrument plugin api is being discussed here by a 
bunch of people who have little to no experience in the field 
of software sequencers. going into implementation details at
the current level of understanding of the problem space is,
excuse me, ridiculous.

after all, what is going to drive your instrument networks?
punched cardboard? certainly not. you'll either use realtime 
input, or a sequencer, or, most wanted, a combination of both.

the closer the integration of the event/plugin system with the 
sequencer, the more uses the api can be put to, with less pain. 

stopping short of the mark where the api becomes useful for 
more applications than basically sample-rate dependent 
event->audio converters is narrow-minded. viewing the 'host' 
as a blackbox supposed to 'do the rest' without caring about 
its internals is blatant ignorance. 

i do think it's reasonable to ignore my personal input since 
i don't offer published code to back up my views, and when i
do, you'll find it centered around my personal musical needs. 

however there are, afaik, people from the rosegarden team on 
this list. it would also be helpful having werner schweer of 
muse fame participate in some way or other. you might also want 
to look at other free/open sequencer engines. for one thing,
you'll find that most, if not all, are tick-based.

vst[i] is a bad candidate i think because few people here will 
have vst host-side coding experience, and the api itself is 
bound to be centered around the particular coding needs of a 
specific company, for a specific application that drags code 
with it that originated in the eighties and never was subject 
to public source-level review.

in short, the more people with hands-on sequencer experience 
participating, the better. none are just too few.

tim

ps: if this post hasn't substantially changed your ways of
perceiving this matter, please don't bother answering.




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