[LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

Alexandre Prokoudine alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 11:14:08 UTC 2011


On 1/14/11, allcoms wrote:

> they know etc. but most importantly the dearth of quality native plugins
> available for Linux seems to be a primary showstopper for most.

Um, no. From my experience the main problem is in organization of your
setup and availability of conventional composition environments.

It wasn't until fairly recently that connecting apps and preserving
these connections was a nightmare, now partly solved by ladish.

And we are still lacking in the DAW department, because the "do one
thing and do it well" unix philosophy is ok for console apps, but
kills half the fun when you have an idea to try and you start
switching between windows all the time only because MIDI sequencers do
only MIDI related stuff well, and Ardour does only audio stuff well
(yes, I know about A3). Qtractor is quite of a hope there, though. I
won't even mention how much work many hosts need re usability and
design, cause I'd like to die old surrounded by grandkids, not be
brutally beheaded in my 30s.

The plug-ins, of course, indeed are important. I'd kill for an LV2
based UI for LinuxSampler that compiled (the existing one doesn't and
is abandoned anyway).

> I think a couple of VSTs have been ported over to LV2

Few dozens actually

> I'm not aware of any that have been ported to DSSI

LV2 can fall back to DSSI.

> A very important factor for such a format would definitely be that the major
> hosts (commercial, foss or otherwise) for all major platforms would be able
> to easily implement support for it and that plugins would be easy to port
> between the different platforms.

There's no money for big commercial players there.

> I'm not aware of any DAWs for Windows that support LV2 or DSSI yet but
> I could be wrong?

Check out Renoise

> there? Another factor I see as increasingly important is that the plugin
> format should be able to take advantage of OpenCL to take advantage of the
> superior processing power of todays GPUs.

Yeees, this is an important point. I'd like more attention given to
this as well.

> Quite how we'd convince Steinberg and co. we need a replacement for VSTi
> and get them to support an open standard though is anyones guess :/

We couldn't. The industry tried getting away from VST back in early
2000s with GMPI and failed.

All in all, we are in a situation where we have to take care of
ourselves, Lately we saw some commercial apps been ported to Linux
(Guitar Pro, Pianoteq etc), but I don't see major hosts or plug-in
bundles ported -- big companies have a different approach to business.

P.S. I've seen this thread when there were less than 500 replies, yay :-P

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org


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