[LAD] IR: Lv2 reverb (without the GUI..?)

[David Robillard]

On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 17:50 +0100, Harry van Haaren wrote:
> Hey All,
> 
> I'm faced with a problem that I can't see an easy way around regarding
> the use of the IR reverb plugin.
> 
> I'm running the GUI in a seperate *process*, and doing all lv2
> communication over OSC. For the most part this is easy,
> the problem rears its head when one want's to use a plugin whose UI
> requires "instance-access".
> 
> Basically, the IR plugin GUI needs access to the Lv2_Handle. But I
> can't provide that due to the OSC communication.
> So I've concidered "spoofing" a plugin on the UI side, and keeping it
> up to date with what the "real" one is doing in the Engine.
> 
> Bit ugly, and if the UI has instance access, will it still call the
> normal "port" events..? Because otherwise I'm lost with trying to
> get at the UI data.
> 
> The other problem is that loading a "sample" into the IR convolution
> happens in a pretty strange way: there's 3 Control Input ports, and
> together they make up a 64bit file hash.
> I understand the reasons behind this decision, and I'm not trying to
> criticise the implementation, I'm just not sure how I can send a
> certain file to these ports to make it work...

The IR plugin uses instance-access as a kludge because there is not a
good port-based communication mechanism powerful enough to do what it
needs to do (e.g. send 'load file' type events).

This is a known problem, and making such a mechanism is a high priority.
Until that time, IR is basically unusable in a process separated host
(among other problems).

The (truly awful) hash thing can and should be replaced with the use of
the newish persist and files extensions immediately.

Cheers,

-dr