[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA and Softsynths

Just an observation about an alternative path on softsynths: a LADSPA plugin or network can be used easily enough as a softsynth using control-voltage (CV) approaches (a few already exist). It's just a matter of agreeing the conventions - implementation is trivial. I've been meaning to finish writing PNet for a while (I've mentioned it a few times) - essentially an environment where LADSPA plugins are strung together to form a "patch" and are wired up to "standard" CV controls for pitch, velocity, MIDI CC etc. These CV components and outputs can be provided by the host as "fake" plugins providing the CV signals based on MIDI input (or by using a non-LADSPA convention). This is trivial to implement and provides an extremely flexible way to build plugin-based softsynths from LADSPA components - or to wire existing self-contained LADSPA soft synths (e.g. the "analogue" synth by David Bartold in the CMT library, see http://www.ladspa.org/cmt/plugins.html) up to MIDI streams. All a question of time - if anyone wants to do the rest of the implementation then please let me know. The code required to do the above also provides a nice way to store patches of plugins for standard processing chains. Patches would probably be stored as XML representations of pure-LADSPA networks. BTW, is anyone doing this already? If so, 50% of the code is already done. ;-) I'm thinking in terms of defining a synth using two patches - one to define the per-note network required (e.g. CV->osc->filter->OUT) and another for any per-instrument post processing (e.g. IN->chorus->reverb->OUT). --Richard