On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 10:39:32PM +0200, Paul Davis wrote: > Fons, you know I broadly agree with you, but a substantial fraction of > the world's software instrument developers appear to feel otherwise. I > can't think of a single major "out-of-the-box" software instrument for > windows or OS X that hasn't been implemented as a plugin.
On of the reasons being that on Windows or OSX in their official incarnations there is nothing like Jack. A single app on those systems is completely isolated. That is not the case in Linux. > i haven't heard a single commercial developer complain about being > forced to do things as a plugin, only about the details of it. Well, a 'rich' plugin standard has to provide almost everything that the operating system provides: audio, midi, GUI, network,... So why not use the system as your host ? All it takes is a good session manager. Existing plugin standards on Linux have been used to to implement a number of quite different things: A. Effects, general audio processing tools. B. Soft-synth modules, as in AMS or Om. C. Complete instruments. The requirments for each of these are quite different. It's somewhat naive to expect that a *simple* plugin standard could support all of those in an optimal way. Also a host that would support all of these would be multi-headed monster. LV2 started off in the right way, but in the usual attempt to make things as simple as possible for the uneducated user, what resulted was too minimal to support anything but the simplest use cases. Porting Aeolus to LV2 would require a number of absolutely non-trivial extensions, Jconv would require a lot more, etc. So if I wanted to port any of these I'd also have to write the host. If that host has to be useful for anything else than being a shell to my own apps it should also include all extensions needed by all other plugins. And a sequencer. And an audio recorder. And in the end neither Aeolus nor Jconv would work in Rosegarden or any other host, unless those authors would include my extensions as well. And I bet a 10 bottles of Amarone they will not. Finally, users 'expect' things. Yes. They also expect, at the age of 20, a house and garden and swimming pool, two cars, a 50" TV, a fixed job, two three-week holidays in a sunny place, free health care and a pension. All for free and without any effort from their side. You can build entire belief systems on this, and even a market, but we've seen during the last weeks what is the result of doing that. As a writer of software that you provide for free, the most stupid thing you can do is to be market- driven. You just waste your time and degrade the quality of your work. Ciao, -- FA Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica Parma, Italia Wie der Mond heute Nacht aussieht ! Ist es nicht ein seltsames Bild ? _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
