26 Apr
2006
26 Apr
'06
12:52 a.m.
On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 22:05 -0400, Phil Frost wrote:
You are not alone on this one. I think it's great
to have as much data
as possible in a place that need not be dlopened to access. However, if
I have to learn to use some whizz-bang library to read yet another
markup language, spend an hour at w3c to learn about all these
web-inspired formats, and grok some ladspa-specific schema to manipulate
a plugin, I think this Simple Plugin API has missed the mark.
Now, obviously the current example is incomplete, but whenever this
stuff is done, I shouldn't have to write more than 5 lines of C to shove
some bits through a plugin, and it shouldn't take me more than 5 minutes
from the time I google "ladspa documentation" to learn to do it.
it takes *way* more lines of code than that to use a ladspa plugin in
this way, and thats for the existing header-only specification.
one the design goals of a good plugin API is to make life simple for
plugins, because there are lots of them and presumably quite a few
authors too, at a certain expense to hosts, because there are relatively
few of them and their authors are likely to be more skilled at what they
are doing.
there are lots of little gotchas even with the amazingly simple API that
LADSPA 1 represents, and quite a few of these will become simpler or
will vanish with the metadata scheme that steve has outlined.
--p