[LAD] Specification issues in open systems

[Darren Landrum]

Chris Williams wrote:
> There's a reason that ReWire (*loosely* a jack equivalent)
> slowly became deprecated in favour of VSTIs on Windows.

Propellerheads won't even give you the time of day unless you're a 
registered for-profit corporation with a real product. Even then, they 
give trouble. Justin Frankel (the Reaper guy) had to argue with them, 
and he has a registered for-profit corporation with a real product! It 
will continue to be tolerated, though, as long as Reason remains a 
popular tool for music, and it *is* quite popular.

THAT's why ReWire is dying off more than anything, assuming it is. 
Steinberg at least made VST an "open" standard (notice the 
flame-war-avoiding quotes there), allowing anyone to be able to develop 
plug-ins, even if they're free. No, it's not compatible with the GPL, 
but that's off-topic for this conversation, I think.

> As to session state saving, it's not something that
> *personally* concerns me all that much, provided each
> component allows the facility for saving its own
> configuration. Paul's right, though; it really is a big
> deal on the other OSs. Users are used to saving their
> project in their DAW of choice and having the DAW
> remember it, rather than them having to be responsible for
> saving each piece individually. DSSI provided some
> capability for this with the 'configure' function / OSC
> call. It gave the host some handle on how to reconfigure
> the instrument in question when loading a project. LV2
> doesn't even do that from what I can see.

My understanding with LV2 is that all communications between the GUI 
(whether included with the plug-in or generated by the host) flow 
through the host, and can be captured, analyzed, serialized by the host 
on the fly. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that. I would 
think that that means the host definitely *can* bring up an LV2 plug-in 
with state information quite intact.

I don't have any knowledge of how difficult it is to do any of this, 
though. I'm only "book smart" on the issue.

-- Darren