Hi everyone, I have a sound recorder and editor app on the market, and I'm currently working on audio effects, such as reverb, compression, etc..
For this purpose I will very likely use LADSPA plugins, which are in their vast majority GPL licensed. This is a bit controversial, but according to my googling, it is quite ok to load GPL plugins into a closed source app. But, the plugins really need to be plugins, that is distributed as separated packages. That said, this isn't only about legal stuff. I am seeing great opportunities for the Android ecosystem concerning such audio plugins. I think that the high interoperability abilities between apps (through intent filters, content providers, etc..) is a great strength of the platform. Therefore, if us developers were able to agree on some particular audio plugin paradigm and discovery system, the Android audio world could become very attractive to both users and developers. In my current idea, a package (= an app on the market) may contain several plugins, and there might be several packages from various vendors. Here, discovery of the plugins by a given host should be quite easy to achieve by using queryIntentServices() where each plugin package would expose a service with a pre-defined intent filter. A content provider could also be used for retrieving information about the bundled plugin. Now, in regard to loading and communicating with a plugin, there are many possibilities, some very complex. Right now, I am thinking about a very simple first mechanism, where a host can retrieve LADSPA shared objects from a plugin package through a content provider exposed by the said package. This will allow for high performance by loading the .so in my native audio engine. This is a very simple mechanism, though with some work, I believe that it should be possible to distribute and load plugins which come with a UI, just as desktop users do with VST instruments. That said, what do you think about the general idea? Would some of you be interested by such an audio plugin system? -- Olivier -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
