Hi all,
the a bit provocative title is not here to start a flame war but to spark a constructive discussion about the
viability and future of the LV2 plugin standard in the professional audio application market.
Some background:
as you probably know Steinberg just released VST3 and developers do not seem happy with it
as it is not backwards compatible, not many new features and it seems less portable amongst platforms than
VST2.4.
Users are unhappy and started a long discussion:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=204080&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
The discussion was picked up on the Reaper forum too.
For anyone not familiar with Reaper, it is a very good audio,midi sequencer.
http://www.reaper.fm
It is a windows app but runs very well under wine and the company writes this on their page.
Users like Alex Stone are using it on wine in conjunction with LinuxSampler
The authors are Justin Frankel from Nullsoft and others. For those that don't know the name, he is the one
that wrote winamp, gnutella, nullsoft installer etc.
On a forum he said he played with the idea of open sourcing reaper.
It is being ported to OS X and probably will get ported to Linux too, given the very good performance it achieves on wine.
Now back to LV2:
The VST3 discussion on the reaper forum resulted in users proposing to create a new plugin standard
in order to "break free" from proprietary standards so they are proposing to add LV2 support to Reaper.
Justin from Reaper answered the following on the forum:
-------
I looked at LV2, there's a lot of stuff which I disliked.. for example,
"ports" being for parameters and audio buffers (and presumably MIDI
events), and all having the possibility of colliding, isnt well thought
out.
Also if you want to add parameters to a new revision of a plug-in, then you have to change the URI? ick.
Or what if you want to change the I/O of a plug-in on the fly..
-Justin
---
see here for the full thread:
http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17198&page=2
I did not look at LV2 so I cannot judge, but I think LV2 developers should discuss about these issues and concerns with
Justin in order sort out problems, and given the joung nature of LV2 , in case important design flaws get uncovered, change the specs a bit.
Reaper is rapidly building up a large user base (users switching away from cakewalk sonar and cubase to reaper) as the application provided excellent performance, is easy to use
and new features are being incorporated at a fast pace.
Dave Philips seem to love the app too as he mentioned it in Linux Journal and he posts frequently on the forum.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005911
I think LV2 and Reaper developers should join forces because together perhaps it will be possible to impose a new open plugin standard
which will get adopted by other commercial applications too and supersede
VST2.4 over time.
not sure if the reaper devs are reading LAD, so perhaps LV2 developers should answer on the reaper forum too in order to sort out the
issues raised by Justin.
Everyone is invited to add his own point of view and I hope that the outcome will be a positive collaboration between LV2 and Reaper.
thanks everyone,
Benno