[LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

allcoms allcoms at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 10:08:29 UTC 2011


Hi list,

I suppose I could've just addressed this to drobilla and got most of my
questions answered but it concerns us all really as even if A3 and qtractor
were to achieve feature parity with Cubase and buds tomorrow (obviously I'm
stretching things a bit there) we still wouldn't see vast droves switching
to Linux DAWs for a few reasons such as hardware support, people liking what
they know etc. but most importantly the dearth of quality native plugins
available for Linux seems to be a primary showstopper for most.

DSSI has a few things coded for it but not much and its still very early
days for LV2 so the open plugin format of the future is still anyones game
and it may not necessarily be either of those that succeeds and gets widely
used of course. I think a couple of VSTs have been ported over to LV2 but
I'm not aware of any that have been ported to DSSI and I think that the ease
in doing so is quite an important factor in the success of any such format,
if not the be-all and end-all. If anyone here has any experience with coding
and/or porting VSTis - what is currently lacking from LV2 or DSSI that could
potentially cause problems for someone wanting to port their big beefy synth
or snazzy FX from VSTi to LV2 or DSSI? I already know about the incomplete
persist LV2 extension but I'm pretty sure that won't be the only thing
needing work.

A very important factor for such a format would definitely be that the major
hosts (commercial, foss or otherwise) for all major platforms would be able
to easily implement support for it and that plugins would be easy to port
between the different platforms. I'm not aware of any DAWs for Windows that
support LV2 or DSSI yet but I could be wrong? There's nothing stopping a
closed source, commecial app vendor adding support for either format is
there? Another factor I see as increasingly important is that the plugin
format should be able to take advantage of OpenCL to take advantage of the
superior processing power of todays GPUs. Quite how we'd convince Steinberg
and co. we need a replacement for VSTi and get them to support an open
standard though is anyones guess :/
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