[LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

rosea.grammostola rosea.grammostola at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 19:47:33 UTC 2011


On 01/14/2011 11:08 AM, allcoms wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I suppose I could've just addressed this to drobilla and got most of 
> my questions answered but it concerns us all really as even if A3 and 
> qtractor were to achieve feature parity with Cubase and buds tomorrow 
> (obviously I'm stretching things a bit there) we still wouldn't see 
> vast droves switching to Linux DAWs for a few reasons such as hardware 
> support, people liking what they know etc. but most importantly the 
> dearth of quality native plugins available for Linux seems to be a 
> primary showstopper for most.
>
> DSSI has a few things coded for it but not much and its still very 
> early days for LV2 so the open plugin format of the future is still 
> anyones game and it may not necessarily be either of those that 
> succeeds and gets widely used of course. I think a couple of VSTs have 
> been ported over to LV2 but I'm not aware of any that have been ported 
> to DSSI and I think that the ease in doing so is quite an important 
> factor in the success of any such format, if not the be-all and 
> end-all. If anyone here has any experience with coding and/or porting 
> VSTis - what is currently lacking from LV2 or DSSI that could 
> potentially cause problems for someone wanting to port their big beefy 
> synth or snazzy FX from VSTi to LV2 or DSSI? I already know about the 
> incomplete persist LV2 extension but I'm pretty sure that won't be the 
> only thing needing work.
>
> 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. I'm not aware 
> of any DAWs for Windows that support LV2 or DSSI yet but I could be 
> wrong? There's nothing stopping a closed source, commecial app vendor 
> adding support for either format is 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. 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 :/

This message comes at a time when I started to think, 'hey it seems that 
the LV2 plugin format is getting forward'. The Calf and Linuxdsp plugins 
show what is possible and also the concept of Composite looks promising 
and now the release of the IR LV2 plugin.

Maybe this development is due to the fact that 'Drobilla' has cleaned up 
the documentation for LV2? Maybe Tom can tell...

Nevertheless, minor point is that Renoise and Pianoteq for example, 
didn't choose the LV2 plugin for their software yet... This should make 
'us' think about what is missing in the LV2 format at the moment. How 
can it made easier for developers (also on Windows and Mac probably) to 
adapt LV2?

However, if the LAD community is able to show that you can make nice 
plugins with LV2, other (commercial) developers will follow more easy 
probably. I don't expect 'commercial' developers to pioneer with LV2.

Regards,
\r



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