[LAD] [EPAMP] an effect plugin API for media players: anyone interested?

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 16:03 +0200, Stefano D'Angelo wrote:

> Yep, but this is not that great for automatic chaining of effects...
> or am I wrong?

lets put it this way. the AudioUnit API includes a concept called a
"graph" that is designed to let hosts do easy plugin chaining. there
isn't a single noteworthy cross-platform host out that uses it, for two
reasons: (a) its not cross-platform (b) every host has its own plugin
abstraction already, and doesn't want to mess with trying to merge not
just another plugin abstraction but a graph/interconnect/chaining one
too.

for what is worth, correct plugin chaining is pretty hard to do. ardour
attempts to do this with LADSPA/VST/AudioUnit/LV2, and its really quite
a difficult problem to get it right for all cases. what ardour does
relies on mechanisms that some way outside of any of the above named
plugin APIs, and are much more related to its internal signal processing
model. if you tried to graft that code into some other host, my guess is
that you'd have to completely reimplement it.

--p