you might notice that even our small, non-commercial group has been unable to make much headway on even small extensions to LADSPA. Ron has been explaining a fundamental difference between the DirectX plugin API and VST: in the former, plugins generate timestamped buffers (as in CoreAudio/AudioUnits on OS-X), on the latter, plugins always generate output for "now". these kinds of differences are deep, and are likely to be much harder to resolve in a standard than the LADSPA stuff we've spoken about. i think this is one of those areas where the cat got out of the bag too soon. each group/company that designed a plugin API believed that there would never be any point in aiming at interopability, and so most of the designs went far and have become fairly widely used. after years of this, its finally dawning on some people that whatever benefits specific plugin APIs bring to particular products and hardware, the proliferation of them is actually *more* harmful. i am skeptical that anyone in the commercial side of things really has the will to do anything about this, even though they may say they do. --p