On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 4:25 AM, Fons Adriaensen <fons@linuxaudio.org> wrote:

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 07:29:25PM -0700, J. Liles wrote:

> I completely agree. But I really think this is a more general problem. Most
> plugins are crap. That's a fact. LADSPA, LV2, VST, AU, whatever. Most of
> them are ununique, incomplete, poorly thought out, devoid of QA, etc. I
> think it would be generous to say that 10% of plugins are useful. But since
> when are we talking about plugins?

The topic of the thread was about reporting bugs. What should a
user do when he/she encounters things like described above ?

* To report a bug would be completely useless in such a case. *

Not true. The bug report would be useful if it was submitted to the distribution and the packager decided to just remove the offending plugins from the distro.

This is why diversity is good. People are free to write as many plugins as they want of whatever level of quality and as long as we as a community have the ability to measure and evaluate such things and share our results, then the bad ones can be weeded out. The problem is, to my knowledge no LADSPA or LV2 plugin has ever been weeded out! We're doing fine at producing new ones.

...

> There's a whole different problem of branding/marketing and the
> misconception that there are even enough unique DSP tasks that anyone would
> require 100s of plugins. The truth is, anyone only needs a handful of basic
> plugins: the rest is permutations.

For normal audio processing (EQ, dynamics, effects,...) that is
true. If you count 'instrument' plugins as well things could look
different. But why should those be plugins in the first place.

Yes, sorry, I was referring only to processing plugins, not to synths (which, depending on their level of complexity, are indeed often better suited to being applications rather than mere plugins).