“LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown. By creating LV2 ‘extensions’ (which can be done independently), virtually any feature is possible for LV2 plugins and hosts.”
LV2 Specification Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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LV2 plugins are small pieces of software that can process or generate signals, mainly audio, but they can also be used for other types. Since they are ‘plugins’ they do not run as programs on their own but are loaded into other processes, called ‘hosts’, at runtime. They can be used e.g. as realtime effects in a harddisk recorder program, unit generators in a modular synth, or batch processing effects in a sample editor.
I remember I saw LADSPA in GDAM dj mixer long time ago http://gdam.ffem.org/- unfortunately this project is dead…
I always thught LV2 had serious design issues. It is designed as a very powerful and flexible api, but it requieres you, as a host, to do quite a good deal of work to support everything it can handle. Plus, it has no way (no standard way) of managing user interfaces for plugins such as VST does.
Even if a way is found, it would force the plugin to separate the UI from the core, which makes programming them even more complicated.. this is because of a design limitation on how the event loop can’t be shared between toolkits (qt/x11/fltk/etc). Ah well..
I must complain about the summary given for this article.
The summary sounded interesting, but given the vagueness I was forced to go look at the pages linked before I could decide whether I was actually interested in the subject or not. A good summary should have at least included the two vital words “Linux audio” to given the context required.
I enjoy reading OSNews, but honestly, it’s amateurish summaries like this that sometimes make me wonder why I bother…
Sorry to whine – I guess being off work sick has put me in a grumpy mood.