Summary: the plugin systems have never been used for the purpose they were designed for. Let's delete them.
The SoundSource plugins system comes from a time where we we very nervous about competing when others were offering M4A support and we were hamstrung on how to do so legally. Times have changed and nearly all the platforms we support have built-in M4A support. When we drop XP/Vista support then we will be able to use MediaFoundation on all Windows builds. FFMPEG support coming on Linux will allow us to use the distro's support for M4A. Our VAMP plugin support hard-codes the use of the plugins to match the way libmixxxminimal.so is built. The dream of being able to use 3rd-party VAMP plugins is essentially non-existent. We would also gain slightly in performance as it would remove various layers that the data has to pass through between the plugin that calculates the analysis and the data getting into Mixxx proper. As a refresher, here's how/where users get M4A support today: Windows XP: No Windows Vista: Yes, with SP1 (or was it SP2?) via MediaFoundation Windows 7+: Yes, MediaFoundation OS X: yes, CoreMedia Linux, built from source: yes when built with faad=1 Linux, Ubuntu PPA: Yes? Linux, Debian repositories: No -- disabled by maintainer intentionally per Debian policy. The future of Linux support here is FFMPEG -- so eventually we'll be in a spot where the user can add M4A support by installing the right FFMPEG package in their system. After XP support is gone, nothing changes here as a result of this change. In my opinion, all of this code is essentially technical debt. We could merge all the plugins into Mixxx proper and be no worse off -- and much better off from a maintenance and code health perspective. Plus we don't have to worry about ABI compatibility in the SoundSource system (which we have not been that good at). So let's do that. Thoughts? RJ
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