Re: [LAD] RFC: Default discovery paths for LADSPA, LRDF, LV2 and DSSI (and more?)

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 5:01 AM, David Robillard<dave(a)drobilla.net> wrote: Filename/label can be made to work; "unique" ID can't, for any dynamic or automatically generated plugin library. Take dssi-vst for example.  It consists of a single library that publishes many LADSPA plugins, whose number and type are unknown until run time.  It can't map them onto a reserved range because it doesn't know in advance what plugins it may have to wrap.  It can't realistically generate a good hashed value, because of the range limitation given in the LADSPA header ("below 0x1000000") and the need to avoid reserved ranges.  It can't pass through the VST plugin's existing numerical ID, because these are typically generated by mapping from strings or hashing, and consequently are also usually out of range, and anyway it can't know whether a LADSPA plugin of the same ID already exists. I was sorely tempted to make it use the unique ID of 1 for every plugin.  I didn't, but the method it actually uses is really no better in practice. I realise many on this list won't care about wrapping VSTs, but any generated wrapper plugin (e.g. from Faust) will have the same problem. Never rely on the "unique" ID of a LADSPA plugin. (URIs are far better than either filename/label or numerical ID of course.)