[LAD] Specification issues in open systems

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Sat Sep 27 18:18:39 UTC 2008


On Sat, 2008-09-27 at 18:49 +0100, Chris Williams wrote:

[ a lot of stuff ]

are you seriously asking me to pull out my examples from vst-plugins
over the last 5 years? yes, VST doesn't have the particular problem you
are facing, but it has plenty of others. you want the most egregious?
you tell me where in the VST spec it details which functions are called
from which host thread. i could continue at quite some length ...

i'm not trying to push back against your complaint. i'm just pointing
out that the type of issue you're facing is actually really quite common
in audio apps and with plugin APIs on different platforms. in
implementing AudioUnit support in Ardour i ran into quite a lot of
really significant problems which could only be solved using google-fu
to pull answers from the coreaudio email list. none of the issues raised
on that list have been documented by Apple and none of them have changed
the API for AudioUnits in at least 5 years. every host developer and
quite a few plugin authors have to face these over and over. we do it,
we fix (most) of the problems, and we forget about it (mostly because we
have no control over what apple does).

i am really not taking you to task for your observations on DSSI - from
what you've written it really does sound like a bit of mess in this
repsect, and quite possibly LV2 as well. but .. i am not entirely clear
why you've approached the problem in the way you have.

your email contained a lot other claims about linux audio in general. i
think that broad claims about this little world are a bit silly.
speculations on why linux audio is in whatever state it is in generally
seem to miss out on a number of important details and they also tend to
skip the fact that this is a story written by a relatively small number
of self-admittedly imperfect and insufficiently devoted people. most of
us do not have the time or inclination to focus on "newbies to audio
programming on linux", even if we recognize that this is a problem and
wish it was otherwise.

--p






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