[linux-audio-dev] Ladspa Gui's (Is ladspa actually la-dsp-a?)

[Steve Harris]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 12:58:21 +0200, Tim Orford wrote:
> surely standalones and plugins both have their place? I dont buy
> the argument that complex fx should be standalones.

Agreed.
 
> > A further conceptual criticism is that it will just encourage people 
> > to produce GUIs that are inconsistent, inelegant, tasteless and hard 
> 
> yes giving people freedom will cause "inconsistent, inelegant, tasteless
> and hard to use" things to arise but it will also cause good things
> too:-) As long as the gui's are optional, this surely cannot be a
> problem. I'm also assuming that multiple alternative gui's can be made 
> available.

Yes (though the current hosts dont give you a way of choosing between
them). 3rd party developers can easily code thier own UIs for plugins, and
you can always uninstall tasteless ones with the power of rm :)

> > to use -- i.e. it doesn't do anything to address the biggest problems 
> > a plugin author might face when writing a GUI, namely what to build 
> > the GUI from and how to design and organise it.  A separate library 
> > to help with that by wrapping basic toolkit widgets in forms likely 
> > to be of use to audio plugins might be worth considering.
> 
> not from my point of view. Any special library is going to be very
> limiting. I would hate to see linux hobbled by this in the same way as
> vst is. I dont think anyone has mentioned in this thread that 
> presumably libvstgui is a significant factor in encouraging the use of 
> those cheesy bitmaps that most of us find unusable even if we can stomach 
> the looks.

You aren't forced to use libvstgui in VST, many people dont. I can see
that a toolkit specially designed for plugins UIs would be useful, but I
doubt anyone would bother to make it, an its likly to not fit enough
peoples tastes in APIs get get traction.
 
> and i dont think the plugin author should _have_ to worry about guis
> at all. People who can do dsp code _and_ user interfaces are the
> exception rather than the rule.
> 
> i would rather some ladspa template gui apps were made which encouraged
> artists to use whatever tech they wanted. Eg Gtk, Qt, Svg, Flash,
> GnomeCanvas, SDL, XUL, DHtml, OpenGl etc...

Yup. In the DSSI scheme all it needs is a tiny bit of wrapped code to bind
OSC messages to GUI elements. Its dead easy in GTK*, and from what I've
seen of Qt, its simple there too.

* infact its automatable, I plan to write a function that will bind the
Adjustment called "MYPLUGIN_GAIN" or whatever to the appropraite OSC
messages when the GUI is created, which would make it possible to spit out
nearly completed GUIs from glade.

- Steve