I think another great application for such a thing would be a JACK patch bay. It would be so much easier to use something like this to connect apps (and internal ardour connections) than it is at the moment. I always wanted to write such a thing myself but never really had the time. In many ways a JACK patch bay would be one of the most demanding applications for this because it has to handle both many-to-one and one-to-many connections and JACK graphs can be very complicated, so I would suggest bearing it in mind while designing it, on the grounds that if it can handle that it will be able to handle many other things as well. I also think that having the option of embedding synth GUIs into the graph is very important.
I think the main decision to be made is how much of the layout should be automated and how much left to the user. On one extreme the user has to place all the modules and the wires are just straight lines between them, and on the other the whole thing is laid out by some kind of optimisation algorithm, with the wires cunningly routing themselves around obstacles. I think the best option has to be somewhere in between.
Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
Hello.
I feel we should write a modular synth editor from scratch. I have checked many existing systems but none is good enough.
The editor would just be the editor. There would not be anything related to audio processing. Developers could use the editor in any project, audio or not.
The editor would handle GUIs such as in AlsaModularSynth, Arts, Galan, Gdam, Glame, NMEdit, PD, Quasimodo, SpiralSynthModular.
Also we should have an API and a script in the system.
I can set up a project folder to our ftp site, ftp.funet.fi, for resources (manuals and screenshots of existing systems, research papers). Coding should happen in some CVS site.
Any comments?
Regards, Juhana
