31 Oct
2002
31 Oct
'02
3:06 p.m.
We should organize a meeting with the cakewalk guy and
other grups
with a proposal.. We could develop some draft here in the lad
groups and invite other open groups to participate too
(openal, beos advocates, etc). An open, cross platform plugin/routing api
could sure give us a huge boost!
you might notice that even our small, non-commercial group has been
unable to make much headway on even small extensions to LADSPA. Ron
has been explaining a fundamental difference between the DirectX
plugin API and VST: in the former, plugins generate timestamped
buffers (as in CoreAudio/AudioUnits on OS-X), on the latter, plugins
always generate output for "now". these kinds of differences are deep,
and are likely to be much harder to resolve in a standard than the
LADSPA stuff we've spoken about.
i think this is one of those areas where the cat got out of the bag
too soon. each group/company that designed a plugin API believed that
there would never be any point in aiming at interopability, and so
most of the designs went far and have become fairly widely used. after
years of this, its finally dawning on some people that whatever
benefits specific plugin APIs bring to particular products and
hardware, the proliferation of them is actually *more* harmful. i am
skeptical that anyone in the commercial side of things really has the
will to do anything about this, even though they may say they do.
--p