29 Apr
2004
29 Apr
'04
9:23 a.m.
On Thursday 29 Apr 2004 11:56 am, Robert Jonsson wrote:
Anyway, I see ALSA and LADSPA mentioned above and felt
I should
comment. The softsynth interface in MusE (MusE Experimental
Software Synthesizer - M.E.S.S) used to have this layout but Werner
recently changed it to a native format.
I think (with emphasis on think, since I don't have the whole
picture) that the reason was among others that this solution does
not allow for faster than realtime execution.
That's true if you are using the ALSA sequencer to deliver MIDI
events. DSSI only uses the ALSA sequencer event types, it does the
delivery just by passing events to the plugin at run() time (much
like VSTi, except it uses parsed events rather than raw MIDI). It
should be fine for non-reaitime use.
I think (once again, think) MESS has QT dependencies
so it would
probably not work as a neutral format
We mentioned it in the RFC as one of the possible existing
alternatives (under the name "libsynti"):
It is probably the closest alternative to the present
proposal, it addresses many of the same problems, it is
working now, and it is an attractively small API.
Unfortunately it is unlikely to be popular as a standard
for Linux audio plugins, simply because it is in C++ and
requires Qt for plugin GUIs.
Since I use C++ with Qt myself, that doesn't bother me, but it's not
really for me to say how far that would put off other developers --
probably quite a bit, given some of the arguments we get. Maybe
someone close to the MusE API could write it up for comparison here.
Chris