Re: [LAD] [EPAMP] an effect plugin API for media players: anyone interested?

On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 21:29 +0200, Stefano D'Angelo wrote: I'm not interested, and I do want to start a flame war, and I won't ignore you. One of the most irritating things in the open source community is not when people come along and (constantly) reinvent the wheel. No, thats actually probably a good thing if its done the right way. The irritating thing is when people propose replacements for Foo without once explaining what was actually wrong with Foo. It gets even worse when the people responsible for Foo have themselves identified a lot of things wrong with it, and have themselves offered up Bar as a result of extensive discussions about Foo and its problems. There is nothing in your draft document that offers up substantive critique of LV2 (or even LADSPA). You make no reference to GStreamer, a project which overlaps with many of your goals. You mumble about the "user interface part is missing" almost as if its an afterthought, when in reality, this has been the single most problematic part of any audio processing API for Linux and other X11 based platforms. Its not just some detail you can tack on, its an absolutely central part of the problem. You also make grand, sweeping claims for NASPRO: "Its main aim is to give audio application developers a full-featured, yet scalable, high-performance and integrated tool to make use of virtually any external sound processing component (including, but not limited to, LADSPA/DSSI, LV2, VST, AudioUnits and DirectX plugins) via a single, fully transparent and platform-independent API." apparently unaware that this goal has (a) eluded almost all other attempts to do the same and that (b) where such efforts have succeeded, getting it right and making it work has been a full time *paid* job for several reasonably well-paid and very smart software developers (e.g. FXpansion's AU/DX/VST bridge systems). you also seem unaware that there is already a working group of plugin developers from the VST, AudioUnits and DX worlds attempting to do precisely what you describe, and that whatever they come up (if they come up with anything), its likely to carry a lot more weight among the world of plugin developers worldwide. so please, go ahead and invent us a better wheel. but first, show us that you understand what's wrong with the old one, that you've seen the efforts to fix it, that you understand the problems with them too, and then explain clearly how your proposals fix both sets of problems. yeah, so i guess i'm a little grumpy. --p