[LAU] Re: FLOSS Audio editors on Linux: are they all dead(-ish)?

On 15/07/2025 10:25, Will Godfrey wrote: [...] I do have quite a lot of (LV2) plugins and being on Manjaro (Arch based) I noticed I am in a strange situation where I have indeed duplicates of plugins in both /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 - but this is another story which is weird because apart from maybe Yoshimi I either install plugins from repositories or AUR and if I download any binary ones put them in ~/.lv2 The issue with Audacity is that it takes ages to search for plugins (VSTs, LV2, whatnot), and even cancelling won't help. Disabling all plugins also doesn't seem to help. And I can't seem to find ways to disable non-audaicity plugins, so Audacity insists in scanning plugins at start-up no matter what. In Tenacity there is an option to disable non-native plugins but it seems to be ignored because it complains at least about LV2 duplicates, plus there doesn't seem a way to specify explicitly which directories to search plugins for. In comparison Ardour or Carla load blazingly fast even with the many plugins I have installed. Ardour finds newly installed plugins on startup really fast, and in both even doing a full re-scanning for specific plugin-types does take a while but is relatively fast. The paradox is that ideally I don't really need external plugins (LV2, VST) in this kind of editor as I find the 'native' ones suffice for this kind of audio editing. I even tried compiling tenacity without any plugin support but it was rocket science and while I managed it in the end (and it took really really long and lots of CPU power), resulting in decent start-up time it's not a very maintainable solution. On the other hand mhwaveedit, GTK2 more ore less abandoned software - alas, loads large stereo wave files quite fast, has all basic editing features and a practical recording interface which works well when recording via jack which it supports natively; it also sort of works with pipewire (albeit with some lag in play/stop). It actually even has LADSPA support which I seldom use as the interface is really hardly usable with more complex plugins. Actually, I admit to having started recently to use a couple of Ardour sessions set-up for 'audio editing' where I just dump files I want to edit, edit them and then quick export via the start/end markers. This is still not as fast as an editor and in the long-run the session gets quite messy (if not cleaned up), but it is also a creative work-around option and you get the mighty power of Ardour like busses, effects etc. :-) Maybe (ab)using Ardour like this could be streamlined (hacked) via scripting, ardour session manipulation (which is XML), but not sure it's worth the effort :-D Lorenzo PS: for both Tenacity (via bug report) and Audacity (via their 'forum') I did report these issues.