On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 01:07:11PM +0100, Frank Neumann wrote:
> - what data fields does a plugin want to store:
>   - one or several lines of text describing the name/purpose of a preset
>     (probably including the author, date, revision - this might sound like
>     overkill for simple filters, but looking at Steve's "Hermes" plugin,
>     it's maybe good to give credit to an author somewhere)

Dublin Core. http://purl.oclc.org/dc/

The whole world should use the Dublin Core, I see red everytime someone
cooks up a halfassed metadata format. It has XML, RDF and MIME
representations, but you can express it in pretty much anything text
based.

Unfortunalty I think it's too late to make LADSPA plugins DC compliant,
but we can for the presets.

XML eg (might not be quite right, its been a while)
<DC>
  <coverage>1200</coverage>
  <title>A preset for Hermes</title>
  <creator>John Smith</creator>
  <creator.email>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</creator.email>
  <subject>A preset that does stuff</subject>
  <date>2000-12-11</date>
  <identifier>/presets/1200/thing.xml</identifier>
</DC>

>   - parameters, put into some sort of a "name, type, value" list, like
>     "roomsize float 3000.0" for a 3000ms roomsize
>   - ...

Well thier all floats, so the type field is easy ;)

<PORT label="foo" value="1.0"/> ?
 
> - the user should be able to create/modify/delete presets. So the number of
>   entries can grow. Also, a way to import presets that other people have
>   designed might be necessary.

Yes, cp, and rm are my favourite import and delete methods ;)
 
> - where and under what name to store the data. As LADSPA gives each plugin
>   a unique ID, this could be part of the name. Maybe something like
>   ~/.ladspa/presets/<plugin_id>.pre ? Or rather make <plugin_id> a directory
>   and put the presets under it, one per file?

This is metadata, but I guess for efficiency its best to encode it into
the filename too.

You probably want /usr/local/share/ladspa/presets/ too for defaults.
 
> - A utility library that unifies accesses to the preset data would be a good
>   thing to have. It should probably offer such functions as

If you store the presets in decent XML then you don't need one of these,
but I guess it would be good to have a standard one for ease.

> - Of course, this also requires that all plugins have a way to offer their
>   presets to the user (GUI); this is where probably the XML stuff is called
>   for.

I think this is a job for the host. But then I would say that ;)

NB I've used XML in these examples but I don't neccesarily think its the
best thing, just that I use it alot. RDF is probably more appropriate.

Also, how about combining this with net descriptions? Or is that too
much / too unrelated.

- Steve 

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