[LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

[Ken Restivo]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:08:29AM +0000, 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 :/


I'm kind of curious to see what Fons has got cooking up with his own new plugin architecture.

-ken