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Old 08-06-2019, 09:07 AM   #20
mike@overtonedsp
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Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: Oxford, England
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Personally, I'd love to see that too. The main reason, is that developers could develop for all three platforms at the same time for the same plugin, and there are countless numbers of plugin developers for the other platforms...
A long time ago I implemented the initial framework for native Linux VST2 support in Ardour. At the time my reasoning was this:
  • There was a wealth of plug-ins available for other OS, most in VST2 format, and most using the JUCE framework (which could already be used to build Linux versions). This would set the bar quite low for porting existing plug-ins and might encourage developers to port to Linux.
  • LV2 was still a bit experimental at the time and little understood by developers. It seemed less likely that developers who had VSTs on other OS would be persuaded to port to a completely different standard (which was unsupported on other OS) and was still evolving.
  • The greater availability of Linux plug-ins for one of the most popular Linux DAWs, at the time, might (I hoped) help greater adoption or at least interest in Linux as an audio platform - possibly more host applications and with it a greater incentive to port plug-ins to Linux etc.
  • No-one else wanted to do it.

I'm not sure to what extent any of this rippled out to other DAWs, developers etc - perhaps not at all - but several years down the line we now have Reaper, Bitwig, Ardour, Tracktion / Waveform, (and probably others I'm not aware of) available for Linux, and a significant number of VSTs available natively for Linux - and DAWs built on Ardour now also have cross-platform support for VST. I'm not sure we could have got there with LV2 alone.

Last edited by mike@overtonedsp; 08-06-2019 at 09:12 AM.
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